Reincarnation
by Corpus Carrion
Summary: The fate of post-war Seattle rests in the hands of an amnesiac mercenary and her slave. They have other concerns.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

I suddenly realized that I didn't know who I was.

As this realization crossed my mind, I stopped walking. I was at the top of a hill that was all covered in crunchy yellow and brown weeds and long grass. Along the slope in front of me were rows and rows of hundreds of dead pine trees lying on their sides, all bent over at an identical angle in the force of some ancient explosion, like toppled dominoes. It created a strange lined texture over the landscape. The sky was light blue and spotted with clouds. It was windy, up so high, and the air buffeted past me so hard it almost hurt my ears.

None of it was familiar.

I looked around, out into the valley and the countless yellowish hills behind it, and behind me at the plateau I'd just come across. There was no one. The completely empty, dead landscape stretched for miles in every direction. The wind pushed against me.

I tried to remember something. Anything. Nothing came. Not so much as my own name. Just walking. Walking for a long, long time, over hill after hill, over tree trunks and past boulders and rivers. I could remember the scenery, but it was distant and vague, like a dream. The farther back I tried to remember, the more it faded, until there was nothing.

I didn't recognize myself when I looked down. My own body was strange. I might as well have been looking down at someone else. That was exactly what it felt like, actually.

I stood there for a long time. I guess I was hoping it would just come rushing back if I waited long enough, and what else could I do, really? What were you supposed to do when this happened? It wasn't exactly the type of problem people planned for and had an awaiting solution for. And even if I had, I wouldn't remember what it was now.

Finally I started walking again, if only to get out of that wind. I took a step down the hill, letting myself slide down as the slope steepened. I skated awkwardly like that all the way down to the bottom of the hill, stopping to hop over a tree trunk or go around a tangle of thorned bushes every so often. I stopped as the slope evened out.

What the hell was I doing all the way out here, wherever this was? There was no civilization anywhere in sight. It looked as though there never had been, even before the war.

The war. Well, I remembered that. That struck me as important. What _did _I remember? I knew about yao guais (I thought of this because, I realized, I was hoping there weren't any around at the moment). I knew about street signs, and candy canes, and acoustic guitars and Robco. I remembered a lot of things, but nothing to do with me.

I sat down heavily on a downed tree trunk, staring at the hills blankly. This was all wrong. I couldn't think. I waited again for some bit of memory to surface—some explanation for what I was doing here and what was wrong with my mind. I wondered how far I was from a town. What if I couldn't find my way back? What if I did run into a cougar or a yao guai before I got out of the woods?

I looked down at myself again, holding my hands up to examine them. The nails were bitten short. They shook slightly, and I glared at them, willing them to hold still.

I was female. I was black. I was wearing a bullet-proof vest over my T-shirt, which was a nice surprise, but I didn't have a jacket. Every article of clothing I wore was black. My bare arms were scarred and burned from various injuries and accidents and there was a particularly thick layer of scar tissue on the palm of my left hand, and the tip of one of my fingers had been lost at some point. A tiny bit of the panic began to ebb away as I realized those things somehow felt okay. Not familiar, but normal. I suddenly wondered what my own hair was like, and reached up to touch it.

There wasn't any. My head was shaved and only a small haze of fuzz was still there. As I ran my hand over it, I brushed over something tacky. I pulled my hand away to look at it, and there were red spots on my fingers. Suddenly I realized my head hurt. I reached up to touch it again. There was a big swollen spot and a nasty gouge on the edge of my forehead, extending toward my temple, that stung viciously when I touched it. That would be the cause of the memory loss, I supposed.

Someone tried to kill me. Worse, they'd gotten away with it. At least they hadn't succeeded. I snorted. How hard is it to give someone an extra shot through the brain to make sure they're dead before you leave them? I wondered if I'd done as bad to them as they did to me. It seemed doubtful. I was probably knocked out after this shot if it screwed up my brain enough to make me forget everything.

I felt a weight on my back, and realized I was carrying something. I pulled the canvas pack off my back and set it on the ground. There was something else strapped to my back, too, and I reached back to pull it off. Cold metal met my hand. Something about the sensation made yet a little more of my fear disappear. I pulled the gun off my back and held it in front of me. It was a four foot long sniper rifle with a suppressor attached to the end. There were only three bullets left in the magazine.

It was the only weapon I had, unless there was something else in the bag. I set the gun down beside me as I knelt to dig through the pack. There wasn't much in there. I pulled out a torn magazine (the kind with writing, not the kind that held bullets and might have actually been useful), some dirty clothes that looked a bit small for me, an empty carton of cigarettes, and a candy bar wrapper. Whoever shot me must have cleaned me out afterward—I couldn't imagine I'd have been stupid enough to be carrying around this stuff but no food or stimpaks or extra bullets. The sniper rifle and bulletproof vest had likely been too heavy for them to bother with.

I held the bag upside down and shook it, hoping I'd missed something. Nothing else fell out. "What a bunch of useless shit," I said aloud, and almost jumped at hearing a strange voice coming out of myself.

I sat staring angrily at the pile on the ground. It didn't give me many hints about who I was or what I'd been doing before all of this. It could have belonged to anyone. I did wonder why I was carrying a magazine, because I couldn't read it. It wasn't even in particularly good condition. I thumbed through it quickly. There were a lot of pictures of women in dresses and high heels. I hoped I wasn't the type who was into that kind of thing.

As I was looking at the magazine, there was a sound at the top of the hill, and I looked up immediately. Someone was standing at the top where I'd been a few minutes ago. I froze. He held a sawed-off shotgun in one hand. He looked at me for a moment, then started down the slope.

The second he looked down to check his footing, I picked up the rifle and trained it on his forehead. He didn't notice. He was having more trouble getting down the hill than I had.

"Hey!" I yelled. The sound echoed many times, piercing the quiet in the hills. He looked up, and stopped.

"Drop the gun," I shouted up to him.

He dropped it. It slid down the hill and came to a stop behind a fallen tree trunk. That was easier than I thought it'd be. But then, I didn't know what he was thinking coming down the hill in plain view with a short-range weapon. Come to think of it, I didn't think anyone would do that if they were planning on attacking.

I looked at him through my scope. He wore a grey furry hat, a scarf, and a greenish parka, despite it being rather warm out. The hat and a pair of rectangular glasses obstructed his face. So I couldn't see much of his expression, but I could hear the confusion in his voice when he ventured, "Ma'am?"

"Come down here," I said.

He slid down the hill as awkwardly as I had, and kept clear of the shotgun on the ground. Small cascades of dirt and dislodged rocks and root bundles fell under his feet. He stopped at the bottom of the hill in a cloud of dust, looking at me blankly. He coughed once.

I lowered the rifle slightly as I approached him. He was a bit of a shrimp. He had to tilt his head up to look at me as I moved toward him. His glasses were so dirty and scratched that I could hardly see his eyes behind him. I reached out and lifted the glasses up off his nose to see the dark eyes behind them. He looked like one of his parents might have been Asian. He also didn't look as nervous as I thought he should have been. Several neat, white scars ran across his cheekbone and down to the side of his face to his jaw. They almost blended in with his skin, which seemed abnormally pale. I wondered if he was one of those vault people.

He was examining me as I examined him. His eyes flickered up to the injury on my head, then back to my eyes. "Are you alright?" he asked tentatively.

"Who are you?"

He blinked at me, plainly taken by surprise. "What?"

I set the glasses back down on his face. He reached up to adjust them. "Who are you, and why are you following me?"

He stared. "You...don't remember? You don't remember anything?"

"You know what happened?" I asked, desperate for any information, even from someone I didn't recognize.

"You've been wandering this way for some time. I called to you, but you didn't answer. You were shot, a few miles back."

"Why are you following me?" I asked again.

"I wasn't the one who shot you, ma'am."

"Really."

"No. I work for you, ma'am."

"Work for me?"

"I'm your slave."

Well. That was convenient. Except—"You don't have a collar."

"No. We have sub-dermal implants."

"Implants?"

He pulled down the neckline of his shirt to reveal a scar and a square bump under his skin. "The kind that kills me if you die or if we become separated by more than five miles."

I looked at the implant curiously until he let go of his shirt and it was covered back up. "I have one, too?"

"Yes," he said. Then, after a moment's hesitation, "Yours poses no danger to you, ma'am. It only measures your vital signs."

I pulled up on the neck of my vest to check, watching my apparent slave out of the corner of my eye. I could barely see a square bulge below my collarbone. "Good thing you caught up to me," I said.

"Yes, ma'am." His tone never really changed. He had sounded surprised when we'd first started talking, but he seemed to have adjusted to the situation quickly. Now his speech was oddly bland and matter-of-fact.

We stared each other down for a moment, each of us probably as bemused and mistrustful as the other as we tried to figure out where we now stood. I carefully took in every detail about him, though I didn't know what use it would be to me. Perhaps it would help me remember something if he was really someone I'd known before. Watchful eyes flickered over me in turn.

"What's your name?" I asked, taking a small step away from him.

"Bruce, ma'am."

"What's my name?"

"I don't know."

I looked at him. "You don't know my name?" I asked, slowly enunciating each word with as much disbelief as I could muster.

"You never told me."

Either he was a really bad liar, or a really good one with a weird strategy. "Well how did this happen?" I asked, pointing to my head.

"Bounty hunters seem the most likely culprits."

I paused, waiting for that to make sense. It didn't. I sat back down on the fallen log. "Bounty hunters."

"Yes. There has been a bounty on your head for some time now."

I stared at him blankly. He went on. "I heard a shot, which must have been what hit you. Then something struck me in the head." He reached up to take off the furry hat, revealing a mop of black hair. He turned slightly to corroborate his story, pulling away a bit of hair to show me a purplish bump on his temple. "I got a glimpse of them, but not much more. When I woke up I saw your footprints leading away from where you'd fallen, so I followed."

"Why?"

"If I get more than five miles away—"

"No," I interrupted, "why is there a bounty for me?"

"You're a mercenary," he said simply. "And you usually take advantage of...the kind of opportunities other mercenaries won't take. You've been labeled a criminal by the Regulators."

"Who's that?"

"Organized vigilantes, ma'am. Like police."

I looked quietly at the pine needles carpeting the ground as I thought about all this. I tapped a finger absently against the grip of my rifle, which I still held on my lap, pointing to the side. Bruce stood still and said nothing, showing no inclination to take any action in particular. Like a slave would, I supposed.

I was half convinced it was some weird dream, but I also realized that I couldn't keep waiting to wake up. It might be a long wait.

I turned to the pack on the ground and scooped everything up and poured it back into the bag. When I turned back to Bruce, he still hadn't moved. He was giving me a curious look, but his face smoothed again as soon as I looked up at him.

"I need to get this checked out," I said, indicating my head. "Maybe yours, too," I added as an afterthought. "And we should probably get out of here before whoever attacked us comes back, don't you think?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you know where we are?"

"Right now we're in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. About forty miles east of Seattle."

I nodded. "Do you know where we can find a doctor?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Lead the way, then."

"Can I retrieve my gun?"

"Oh, yeah," I remembered. "Go ahead."

He turned and marched back up the hill. The gun was nestled against a tree about halfway up. It took him a long time to get up there. When he finally reached it, he lightly brushed off and holstered the weapon before working his way back down. By the time he returned, he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

"You okay?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Come on," I said, and he moved ahead of me to take us to wherever we were going.


	2. Chapter 2

_I should probably just change my pen name to i-heart-ghouls-and-slavery._

* * *

**Chapter 2**

We half-walked, half-slid down our fourth or fifth slope and finally came to more even ground. The hill had dumped us into a clearing that must have been logged out a long time ago. Every so often a rotted stump poked out of the ground. I couldn't see a road anywhere.

"Are you sure you know where you're going?" I asked.

Bruce looked around. He was breathing strangely again. "Relatively sure."

I looked at him.

"I apologize. I'm doing the best I can."

I shrugged, looking around the clearing in annoyance. It wasn't like _I_ could help any. As he continued forward toward a copse of dead trees at the far edge of the clearing, he pulled an inhaler out of a pocket and put it up to his mouth.

"You do jet?" I asked before he sucked in. _I _let_ you do jet?_ is what I meant.

"No, ma'am," he said, still holding it in front of his face. "It's Breathe-Easy. I have asthma."

"I bought an asthmatic slave?"

"I guess so, ma'am."

I wondered if I'd been a bit stupid in my previous life. "Is it usually this bad?" I asked, suddenly apprehensive. I didn't want anything to happen to my only connection to my history, and the only person I'd met in the wastes so far, even if he didn't seem to have a lot of answers. Having him there helped put me at ease, even if he hadn't been very useful so far.

"Yes, when we're moving quickly. It will get better if I take this."

I thought we'd been walking at a fairly slow pace. "How much of that do you have?"

"This is my only inhaler. It's almost empty."

"Maybe you should save it."

He took a long, slow breath. "Is that what you'd like me to do, ma'am?"

I shrugged. "They're your lungs. I trust you know how best to keep yourself from dying. We could slow down, if that'll help."

"That...would be helpful," he said, inclining his head slightly. "If it's not too much of an inconvenience."

"Well, yeah, it is. But there's not much we can do about that, is there?"

He slowed after that, and put the inhaler back in his jacket pocket without using it. Most of the trees in the patch of forest we passed were dead, but there were green blades of grass poking up through the organic debris on the ground. Occasionally there was a fern, some bright green and some more sickly. I even saw some flowers. I made sure not to step on any of them.

"So what were we doing all the way out here?" I asked.

"We were pursuing a target."

"Target?" I said. "Oh. Right. Mercenary. How does that work?"

"We have a mediator who organizes clients for you in areas across Seattle and the settlements around it. I meet with our mediators to get contracts and payments, so I'm the only one they ever see. I bring the contracts back to you, and you complete them."

"No one knows who I am, then?"

"No."

Not even me. Sort of ironic. Or something. "So whoever tried to kill me must have followed you out here, then just waited for the right time to shoot."

"Yes...I think that must have been what happened," he admitted hesitantly.

I may have just imagined him hunching his shoulders slightly as I walked behind him. "Well, that was stupid of you," I commented. He did not reply.

I wondered if he was going to be more trouble than he was worth. He didn't seem very smart, he could barely walk without loosing his breath, and he didn't look like he'd be any good in a fight. I wondered if I should just get rid of him after I'd learned as much as I could from him. "How long have we been together?" I asked.

"Almost five years, ma'am."

Wow. Longer than I'd guessed. I supposed, since I'd kept him around for that long, that he must have been doing something right. And now that I thought about it, anyway, I couldn't exactly just sell him—he had that chip in his chest. Unless we could get it out, I'd have to kill him unless I wanted him following me around for the rest of my life. I didn't think he quite deserved _that._ Not yet, at least. But maybe there was someone who could take the chip out. I guessed that would be a delicate operation—there had to be something preventing him from just cutting it out himself—but you never knew.

Would he even want to cut it out, though? He didn't seem particularly unhappy with me, or his position. He didn't look like he had many feelings at all.

We walked over more hills and through dead forests for another half hour or so before we came to a dirt road and switched our direction slightly to follow it. I kept asking Bruce more questions at first, but talking seemed to make him lose his breath and slow down even more, so I grudgingly kept silent after the first few inquiries. Gradually we left the forested area and the terrain got flatter. The road went from dirt to gravel to cracked pavement. We seemed to be getting closer to civilization, whatever there was left of it.

I decided to stop when we came to a small bridge. Water oozed slowly underneath it. My stomach was growling. We didn't have any food, but water was better than nothing. I climbed down the bank and knelt next to the water in the shade of the bridge. I'd scooped up several handfuls and sucked them down before Bruce knelt down next to me and stuck his face directly into the stream. I scrubbed at the side of my head where blood was encrusted over my skin. It came off in thick, slimy, red flakes. I winced when I hit the cut where a bullet had scraped my skull, and quickly ceased cleaning.

"Do you have a geiger counter?" I asked.

"No, ma'am," he said, swallowing as he came up from the water and sat on his knees. A few drops of water clung to the ear flaps of his hat where they'd brushed the surface of the water.

We'd have to get one. One more thing to add to the list.

I took one more drink, then sat back. The shade felt nice. I glanced over at him. He'd taken off his scarf but still wore the coat and hat. "Aren't you hot?"

"No, ma'am."

I shrugged disinterestedly.

We'd been sitting for a while when I felt an itch on my left leg. I reached down absently to scratch it. I stopped and turned to stare at it when I touched it. My heart practically stopped. I grabbed the bottom of my pant leg and jerked it up.

Underneath was only a metal rod that came out below my knee and disappeared into my boot.

"What is this?" I said breathlessly.

I looked up at Bruce. He was looking at me oddly.

"What the fuck is this?" I asked again.

He opened his mouth hesitantly, looking unsure of what to say.

I reached out and seized the front of his shirt, pointing to the metal. He flinched.

"_Where the fuck is my leg?_"

"I don't know!" he said. "It's been like that since before I met you. You never told me what happened." He was very stiff, hunched into himself and leaning as far away from me as he could with me still holding onto him. His glasses had slid down his nose, and he stared out at me from over the tops of the rims. "You didn't notice it until now?" he questioned carefully.

"...It felt normal."

"It is normal," he said. "When I met you, you were already adept at using it. It's been that way for a long time. You probably stepped on a mine when you were young."

I stared at him for a moment longer, then let go and sat back. He readjusted his glasses. I looked down at the rod. It connected to a cup covering the upper edge of my shin. "It itched," I said.

"That's a phantom limb. It's common for amputees to have the sensation. You've complained of it before."

I shoved my pant leg back down to my ankle (the pants were too short for me and it only reached as far as the tops of my boots). Now it began to hurt, not just itch. "Is there anything else I should know before I get any more nice surprises like that?"

"Nothing that I can think of, ma'am."

I was missing a goddamn foot. How the hell had I not noticed that?

But...maybe that was a good thing. Like Bruce said, I was used to it. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem.

Not wanting to think about it anymore, I pulled my bag out in front of me. "What's with all this crap I'm carrying around?"

"...crap?"

I dumped the contents of the pack on the gravel beside the stream.

Bruce studied the objects briefly, and shrugged slowly. There wasn't much there that wasn't self-explanatory, I suppose. I was more frustrated about what wasn't there than what was. "I think the people who shot me took my stuff before they left."

"That is probably an accurate assumption, ma'am. I'm missing some of my things as well."

"Did I use to have more weapons than just the rifle, then?"

"Yes, ma'am. In the past you have also carried a submachine gun and pistol."

"And did we use to have food and caps?"

"Yes, ma'am."

My stomach growled again. "Where are we going to get more money? We can't wait to eat until the next time I get a job," I said. "What about the contract we just had? You said we were going after someone. Did we get them?"

"Our most recent contract was probably a fake ordered by the bounty hunters themselves. I doubt there was any real target; they just wanted to follow me back to you after I talked to our mediator."

"How come they didn't shoot you?" I suddenly wondered. "You only got a bump on the head."

"The bounty is not for me, ma'am. I think they suspect I'm a slave. I think they don't know that we're implanted, or they wouldn't have bothered stipulating that I be left alive."

"They want you alive? That's nicer than I'd expect, from bounty hunters."

"The reward is being offered by the Regulators. They pride themselves on their code of ethics."

"Huh," I said. "Maybe we should tell them about the chips, then."

"I wouldn't recommend that, ma'am," Bruce said quickly.

"Yeah, I was joking."

My eyes went back to the pile of stuff on the ground. "What about this?" I asked, holding up the magazine, the only item that still didn't make sense to me. I looked at Bruce. "Can you read?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What's it say?"

He took the magazine from me and looked at the first page, which was actually somewhere in the middle of the original book; the rest had been torn away. " 'Want to land yourself a man?' " he read aloud. " 'Follow these ten easy tips and'—"

"Stop," I said immediately. He lowered the magazine and looked up at me. I slowly reached out and took it back. I looked at the faded ink of the text. "Why did I have this?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

I tossed the bundle of paper into the stream in annoyance. If only you could eat paper.

"So," I said, counting off on my fingers. "We need to find a doctor, first." My head had been pounding since I woke up. I tried to ignore it. "Then, we need to get some food. Then we need to get some more ammo—" I paused to look at Bruce again. "How many shells do you have for that thing?"

"Five, ma'am."

"Okay. We definitely need more of those. Maybe that should be moved to the top of the list. Then, we need to go find the mediator who gave us that fake contract and see what he knows about the people who ordered it."

"You want to find the bounty hunters, ma'am?"

I snorted. "You better believe I do." I stood up, then squinted down at him. "Look, will you stop calling me 'ma'am' all the time? I thought I would get used to it, but I really don't think it's going to work out."

"Yes. What should I call you instead?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. 'Hey you' works."

"Okay."

"Did I tell you to call me that before, or did you start doing it on your own?"

"I've always addressed you that way. You never objected to it before."

"I see. Well, come on. We've got a lot to do, and I'm hungry."

"Yes, ma—yes."

He stood up, then froze.

"What?" I said.

"Ma'am, please don't move," he said quietly. He slowly pulled his shotgun from his side.

I glared at him, but didn't move. "What the are you doing?"

There was a sudden scrabbling on the rocks behind me, and I turned to look. There was a screech behind me, then the boom of the shotgun, and my arm suddenly stung. I dropped to the ground to avoid further shots. There was another report as Bruce shot again.

I watched as he held the gun up for another few seconds, then lowered it a bit to look at whatever he'd been shooting at. I looked behind me, and there was a dead yao guai on the rocks bleeding into the river. My arm throbbed, and I looked down at it. Several small spots in my upper arm dripped blood down to my elbow.

"You idiot, you shot me!"

He lowered the gun all the way, gaping at me. "I apologize. You moved."

"You _apologize_?" I growled and stood up. "_I moved?_ Are you trying to tell me it's _my_ fault that you just shot me?"

He opened and closed his mouth. "No," he said quickly. "It's my fault."

I looked down at my arm again. One more thing to get the doctor to fix. I muttered a curse and turned to climb up the bank, kicking aside a leg of the yao guai on my way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

It was a couple long, slow hours later when we finally got to the town Bruce was looking for. We'd passed several others on the way but they were either deserted or didn't have a resident doctor. We'd seen no one else on the road. These would be the first people other than Bruce that I'd met for, really, as long as I could remember.

At the side of the road leading into the town was a big highway sign that had been repainted over with something different on top, in dripping white house paint. The name of the place, I assumed.

The town consisted of little more than a few scattered ramshackle houses, a general store, and a clinic (the latter two advertised with large signs out front with pictures on them so even I understood them). A woman raked at a feeble patch of a garden beside one of the houses. An old man sat on a hanging bench on the porch in front of the store.

"Something has occurred to me, Bruce," I said as we stopped in the center of town.

"What's that, ma—" He cut himself off again.

"We don't have any money," I pointed out. "And unless that blow to the head has confused me on this, I think doctors usually charge for their services."

"I don't think you're confused about that."

"So what are we going to do?"

I waited, and after a few moments he seemed to realize it wasn't a rhetorical question. "You're...asking me?"

"Isn't that what I just said?"

Bruce was quiet for a moment. It seemed an unexpected question for him, but he had evidently been thinking about it anyway. "We could offer to do something for them in exchange for treatment. I'm sure they have something they need dealt with. Maybe something as simple as a pack of coyotes nearby."

It was worth a try. I shrugged and walked toward the clinic, which was indicated with a red cross painted on the sign beneath a word. I noticed now that I walked with a slight limp. It would probably be more apparent when I tried to move more quickly. I hoped it wouldn't impede me too much. At the moment, at least, it wasn't really bothering me.

I stepped up the stairs to the doctor's building. I nearly had to duck to get through the door frame. I must be tall. Maybe Bruce wasn't as freakishly short as I thought.

It was warm and dim inside. There were no windows in the place. Directly in front of the door was a desk, behind which sat a balding man holding a book with the cover folded around the back of it so he could hold it in one hand. He looked up when we came in. I heard Bruce close the door behind me, and the sunlight from outside was cut off.

The man looked at us blankly for a moment, lowering the book. Then he saw my head. "Well," he said, raising his eyebrows. "_That's_ something." He closed the book and set it on the desk. "What happened to you?" He waved for me to come over, not wasting any time with greetings. Which was just fine with me. I went to the desk and bent down so he could see. He turned on a bright light on a stand next to the desk. He squinted up at me, then took my face in his hands and turned it so he could see. I resisted the urge to slap him away.

"You're a lucky woman. This was a close call."

"You don't have to tell _me_," I said, straightening.

"It'll cost you a hundred caps to get it fixed up."

"Yeah, well...about that," I said, and the man frowned slightly. "We don't actually have any money. I was hoping we could work something out..."

"Oh," the man said, returning to the chair behind the desk with an air of finality. "No. I don't do that. No bartering, no IOUs, no trading favors or odd jobs. I only take caps. Up front." He picked up the book again.

"Why not?"

"Too many bad experiences. Too much waster scum wandering in and conveniently never ending up paying me anything. Charity is expensive."

"But I've been shot," I said lamely. I hadn't expected him to outright refuse us. "Why do you think I needed to come in here in the first place? We were robbed. We'll pay however we can."

He shrugged, not looking up from the book. "Sorry. You can go to the store and try to pawn something there or ask around town and see if anyone else will pay you to do some work for them."

I glared down at the man. After a moment, he looked up at me again. "Unless you had something else you wanted to discuss?"

For some reason I'd had this notion that doctors were all forgiving and merciful and helpful. I wondered if they were all like this.

I turned toward the door. Bruce was standing in front of it, and stepped smoothly out of the way when I approached it. I didn't go through it. He looked up at me with the vaguest look of apprehension. He was thinking the same thing I was. I took the sawed-off shotgun out of its holster on his hip, turned around, and leveled it at the doctor.

The doctor looked up and blinked at me. Then he sighed. He set the book down and lifted his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"Get up," I said.

He slowly stood and trudged out from behind the desk. "What do you know," he muttered. "_More _waster scum." He wandered into a room in the back, and I followed him.

"Sit down," he said with a careless gesture toward a strange-looking reclining chair under a light. I handed the gun off to Bruce, who took it wordlessly, then took off my pack and rifle and sat in the chair. My feet hung off the edge of the footrest. It was oddly hard, despite the minty-green padding on the seat and head rest.

Bruce stood beside the chair and tracked the doctor with the shotgun as he moved about the room, gathering supplies. He eventually returned with an armful of stuff that he set on a metal table next to me. He glanced up at Bruce with an irritated look and shook his head slightly as he arranged the objects. He turned on the light above me. The glare blinded me. I squinted into the darkness beyond the light. There was a tinkling of small instruments.

"He's going to inject you with something, ma'am," Bruce said.

"What? No. You're not injecting me with anything," I said.

"Then it's going to hurt," came the doctor's tired voice. "So don't shoot me because you feel a pinch." There was a small _tink_ as he set what must have been a needle back on the table. He picked up something else, and after a moment he was rubbing the side of my head with something wet and cold. After he got all the blood off, he went at the wound with tweezers, I guess picking out all the dirt and bone bits and who knew what else.

This all took a long time, but the doctor's hands moved with a quick precision that betrayed how many times he must have done this. The barrel that I could see out of the corner of my eye never moved. That reminded me. "I need you to look at my arm, too."

The doctor had just started sewing stitches in my head. He paused, the needle poised in the air in one hand, a black string trailing from the eye. "What's wrong with your arm?" I could barely see him looking down at it from behind the glaring light. "You've been using it for target practice?"

"Yeah."

"For future reference, when someone is pointing one of those at you," he said, gesturing to Bruce's gun, "you're supposed to move out of the way." When he was done with my head he moved to my arm and began digging into the outer edge of it.

"Ow."

"You didn't want the analgesic," he reminded me. True, though I doubted he was exactly going out of his way to be careful.

Eventually he had pulled three small metal pellets out of my arm and set them on a tray on the table. He was about to put a bandage over me when Bruce commented, "That's not very clean."

The doctor stopped and looked daggers at him. Then he turned and moved away from the table. Bruce followed him to a cabinet on the wall, where he pulled out another, apparently cleaner, roll of gauze. He brought it back over and wrapped it roughly around my biceps, then wrapped another strip around my head. He fastened it on, then took a step back. "It's done. Now will you go?"

I got out of the chair and took the gun back from Bruce. "No. Look at him, too."

The doctor rolled his eyes so hard I thought he might have injured them. "And what is wrong with _you_, pray tell?"

Bruce took off his hat to show him the bruise. The doctor took his head roughly in his hands and turned it to see the bruise from different angles. Bruce stood there like a doll and let him. I felt an inexplicable pang of annoyance.

The doctor let go of him and went to a cabinet again, retrieving a flashlight. He came back, clicking it on, and shone it in Bruce's eyes. He winced in the light, but didn't move. The doctor moved the light back and forth between each eye. "Have you been dizzy at all? Nauseous?"

"No."

The doctor clicked the light off and held it at his side. "You're fine." He looked back at me sullenly. Bruce rubbed his eyes. I handed him back his gun.

"We'll leave," I told the doctor. "Don't follow us."

"Don't worry about _that_," the man muttered. I went back out into the first room.

"Hey you..." Bruce said quietly as we came to the door.

I almost laughed when I remembered that's what I'd told him to call me. I didn't think he'd take it so literally. "What?"

He was still aiming the gun at the doctor, who stood behind the desk looking morose. He watched the man as he murmured to me. "I hope you won't think I'm being presumptuous if I bring something to your attention that you may already be aware of. I only think it's necessary for me to tell you because of your memory loss."

"Oh?" I said, matching his quiet tone. "Necessary to tell me what?"

"The Regulators have a strong presence here. They function somewhat like a pre-war police force. It's possible he'll go to them and give them a description of us."

"You think a description will be enough to be a problem?"

Bruce was quiet for a moment. He looked up at me, his face as blank as ever. "It wouldn't be, usually. But you're a six-foot-something bald black woman with a limp and a sniper rifle."

"Oh," I said. I'd forgotten that. "Good point." I turned back to the doctor. He was watching us suspiciously.

"Go in the back room and lie down on the floor until we leave," I said to him. "Where we can see you."

He did, albeit with some reluctance. I watched him go, and pondered briefly what I should do. I turned to Bruce. "If we kill him, it's going to be more trouble than we have already. Those people outside have already seen us. They're going to know we're the ones who did it." I paused. "And maybe these Regulators have more important things to do than track down people who stole 100 caps worth of stitch work out in the middle of nowhere."

He nodded in agreement, looking relieved. "You would be upset with me later if I didn't say anything now. I just wanted to warn you."

We had no problem leaving. No one stopped us and no one followed us as we slipped out the back door and walked directly out of the town, back to the road. When I asked, Bruce confirmed that we were going toward Seattle, where the mediator was.

I walked in front now, and after a while I could hear Bruce breathing. I glanced back at him, and he was holding the inhaler up to his mouth. There was a weird hiss as he sprayed a puff of the medicine out and sucked it in.

"Five years, huh?" I said. He nodded slowly, holding his breath. I slowed my pace a little bit. "When did you become a slave?"

He exhaled slowly. "I was born into slavery."

"Yeah? But they taught you how to read and things?"

"They teach everyone at the compound where I grew up."

"But they taught you to shoot, too, I hope."

"Yes, ma'am." He gave a small sigh at letting the title slip again.

"You're really having trouble with that, aren't you?"

"I apologize."

"Whatever. How many owners have you had?"

"Only one before you."

I turned to look at him again. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one."

"How old am I?"

"I don't know."

I suddenly remembered I hadn't even seen my face yet. I should have looked for a mirror in the clinic before we left. "I'm not old, am I? I don't _feel_ old."

"I would guess you're ten years older than I am."

"Do you know anything about my life before I met you?"

"No."

I looked at him in disbelief. "Nothing?" I snorted.

"I apologize."

"We didn't talk very much, it seems like."

"No, we did not."

"Well what was I like _after_ you met me?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"You know, how I act, compared to before. Am I different now?"

He paused, speaking slowly as though choosing his words very carefully. "Yes, perhaps. But I think it's too early to tell yet. I'm sure you will remember all of this soon."

"Really? You think I'll regain my memory?"

"Yes. Most people with retrograde amnesia do after a short time. I suspect you'll be back to normal in less than a few days."

The thought, unexpectedly, made me nervous. Back to normal. Meaning the person whose body I was inhabiting would return. What would happen to me then? I wasn't the person I was before, was I? I didn't even know who that person before me was. Would I change back to my former self when I remembered everything?

I noticed his breathing had returned to normal after a dose of Breathe-Easy. "Is there a place where you can get more of those?" I asked, indicating the inhaler.

"There is a chemist downtown who produces medicines based on formulas from pre-war pharmaceutical companies. He's managed to make several types of asthma medications. I get refills from him."

"I don't suppose that's cheap."

"It does not cost us anything. We sought out and brought back the formulas for most of his medications. The agreement was that if we did so, he wouldn't charge us for any of my medicine in the future."

"Great," I said. "We can go refill later."

I'll admit I was almost dead on my feet by the time we got to the truck stop. The sky was darkening as we went down the off-ramp toward the diner there. Several eighteen-wheelers still sat in front of the building. Inside was a long bar with a row of benches in front of it. The walls were covered in signs with green, swirly, calligraphic writing over mountains or pine trees, and old photos of loggers and hikers.

There was a deep freeze in the back. Under an enormous pile of empty packages, I finally found some unopened food. "Thank God," I said. "I think I'm about to pass out." I took out everything I could find, handing some of it up to Bruce.

After we ate, we moved to the benches at the tables. It would be a good place to sleep. "Am I supposed to take this thing off or something?" I asked, looking at my artificial leg.

"You do sometimes," Bruce said vaguely from the next booth over.

It seemed like it would get uncomfortable after sleeping on it for a while, so I took it off (which took a few minutes to figure out how to do). I set it on the checkered linoleum floor under the table and stretched my legs out in front of me on the bench. My right foot stuck up into the air while my left pant leg simply deflated at the end. The asymmetry was weird.

For lack of a blanket, I draped my nearly empty pack on top of myself. Now I saw why Bruce had all the warm clothes.

I don't know how long I'd been asleep when I woke up again, but it was still dark. I glanced around the diner, looking without moving for whatever had awoken me. There was a noise, then someone saying something indistinguishable. Then, a scream.

I fairly fell off the bench. Shoving the pack off of me, I swerved around to the next table. Bruce was lying on the bench, screaming. He was still asleep.

I reached down to grab his shoulder and shook him hard. "Hey! Wake up!"

After a moment he opened his eyes, still shouting. When he saw me, his hand flew up to hit me, and I caught it just before it did.

I tightened my hands around his wrists and held him still. "It's me!" I said. "Calm down."

He pushed against me for a few more confused seconds, then stopped, but instead of looking relieved, a look of contempt crossed his face. I wondered what he could have been dreaming of.

"Jesus," I said quietly, letting him go. "What's the matter with you?"

He swallowed between heavy breaths, and didn't look at me.

"Is this going to happen often?"

"No," he croaked.

"You want to...talk about it or something?" I asked, wincing internally at the thought.

"No."

I shook my head and went back to my bench. There was no more screaming for the rest of the night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

The road to Seattle was dotted with signs announcing its proximity. It was repeated often enough that I began to recognize the shape of the word. And I knew the numbers already. Seattle, thirty-three miles. Seattle, twenty-six miles. We had to stop for the night again when we got to the sign that said we were fourteen miles away.

This time, the night went uninterrupted by any loud sounds.

As the forests began to disappear, more buildings and crisscrossing roads appeared. We saw a trader every once in a while, and raiders once or twice (but we saw them from far enough away that we were able to hide and wait for them to leave before continuing), but the roads were mostly clear. Occasionally we passed a settlement, but we didn't stop. There was little point when you didn't have money to buy anything with. The sooner we got back to that mediator, the better. If nothing else, we might be able to pick up another job. I'd picked up my pace for this very reason. Bruce didn't have trouble keeping up as long as he used the inhaler, and I wasn't too worried about him running out now that we were pretty close to the city where he could resupply.

We climbed up a tall hill that stretched across the landscape a very long ways to the north and south, and by the time we reached the top we must have been more than a few hundred feet higher than we'd been on the flat ground below. As we crested the hill, a cluster of both distant and close massive structures came into view. To the right, highway exits and entrances spiraled up into the air and intertwined in strange patterns near the hill, then separated, distributing themselves into different areas of the city. Behind the tangle of roads was the city itself, the downtown area clearly visible by the skyscrapers that jutted from the ground in a line of jagged black and grey against the horizon. It contrasted starkly with the curves of the landscape and the smaller, decrepit buildings I'd seen on our journey so far. Past the roads and the city, straight in front of us, was the ocean—its shore lined with impossibly tall red and orange metal things (cranes, I think), and beyond that was a long island dotted with dark green, its color dulled by the low clouds.

Bruce came up behind me, breathing shallowly, and I realized my mouth was hanging open. I closed it. Wind whistled quietly over the top of the hill, tugging at my clothes. I could see someone walking along one of the elevated roads. Nothing about the city was familiar.

"Do we come here often?" I asked.

"We live here."

I turned to him. "Where?"

"A few places. It's not always safe to stay in one place every night. Particularly after what happened the other day."

"But they think I'm dead," I said. "Unless we see them again, they shouldn't be giving us any more trouble, at least until they figure out they failed."

"If you'll allow me to say so, I think this could be more of a problem than you think."

"What do you mean?"

"These people know who we are. They've seen us, and they can tell other people about us. They might have even taken a picture."

"A picture?"

"A photograph. Of you. That's how many mercenaries prove they've completed a contract. Our attackers might have used the same method."

"Well, we can worry about that later." I looked back down at the highways below, then took the rifle off my back to hold the scope up to my eye. I squinted through it at the people wandering over the arcs of pavement, passing behind and in front of rusted cars and busses. "There are raiders."

"Yes. They gather in the area just south of downtown. For the most part they've been chased out of the downtown area."

"How do you get past them?"

"Go around," he said. He pointed to the shoreline. "On the viaduct, over there."

I sighed. I didn't want to go all the way over there, but there wasn't much we could do about it with less than ten bullets between us. Forced to run away from a bunch of raiders. Humiliating.

So we walked straight across to the water, until we got to the smaller highway beside the docks on the shore and followed it north toward the city. There were no raiders on the road, but there were others. More people than I'd seen anywhere else so far. A scruffy man wearing a pistol belt with a revolver in it sat on a guard rail and watched us pass. He had a scrap of green cloth wrapped around one arm. Out on the docks, a group of children fished with a crude pole and line over a bent and broken railing. A boy with a shirt several sizes too large suddenly yelled excitedly as he caught something, and yanked a twitching fish up and over the railing.

"Why don't the raiders come over here?" I asked Bruce as we passed under the shadow of an enormous crane. I looked straight up, following the trail of metal bars that formed the object. I could see the top of it swaying slightly, and it creaked in the breeze.

"The Regulators and the League keep them out. A gang," he explained before I could ask. "You saw the man with the armband back there?"

"Yeah. The green thing?"

"That was a Leaguer."

"So who are they?"

"At one time they were little more than raiders themselves. After they settled here they grew more civilized. Their numbers have grown enough that about a sixth of the people in Seattle belong to their ranks. They control a good deal of the city. They run the slave trading post where I grew up."

"Is that good or bad?"

He shrugged. "Depends who you ask. The Regulators don't like them. They do a lot to keep the city up and running, but they still don't have as much control as they'd like, and they don't like competition. They have a habit of not paying much attention to the laws the Regulators try to uphold. The two factions have a tenuous relationship in which they generally ignore each other."

"I assume we're siding with the League by default."

"I wouldn't say we're really siding with anyone, ma'am. The League provides most of your contracts, but you always said you didn't want to be directly affiliated with them."

As the skyscrapers rose up on our right, we took an exit off the viaduct to make our way up to the city. We passed buildings of greater and greater size until there were so many of the behemoth structures that I couldn't see past whichever street we were currently on. Piles of trash lined the walls of some of the buildings—messes of garbage and concrete and metal piping and rebar and glass and wire and chainlink, presumably from buildings that hadn't survived the war. It completely blocked some streets. There were some buildings whose owners had cleaned and repaired them so that they looked almost pre-war, and nice signs hung outside of them—not just hand-painted ones. The repairs usually stopped a few floors up, and sometimes I could see the line where the dirt and mildew and broken windows started. There were little spots of green and grey where lichen and moss had started growing on windows or walls.

I couldn't really see why you'd ever possibly need so many floors in one building. Except to get a good view on everyone below. I looked straight up and gave the top floor of the building a longing look. It was partly obscured in the clouds that were coming in. I'd rather have been up there where I could see everything and no one could see me, than down here on the same level as everyone else, not knowing what was around the next corner.

The number of people scurrying around increased with the number of buildings. It seemed to be a relatively safe place to be, or at least the other people around thought so. They walked about freely and leisurely, and many of them carried no weapons. Bruce had been right about there not being any raiders downtown, at least.

Once we passed someone wearing a long jacket and a rather stupid hat. He watched me expressionlessly as we passed each other, adjusting the strap of the hunting rifle over his shoulder.

"Regulator," Bruce said very quietly after we went by him.

I looked back over my shoulder to watch him, only to find him watching me, as well. "Cute outfit," I said, equally quietly.

We came to the corner of an intersection, and Bruce stopped. "Hey you," he said.

I smirked. "You don't actuallyhave to say that every time you want my attention."

A small frown tainted his face. "Then what would you prefer?" He sounded, for the first time I'd heard, slightly frustrated.

"I told you, I don't care. You're thinking about this too much. Just call me whatever you want."

"Except 'ma'am' and 'hey you'."

I looked down at him in mild surprise. "Are you being a smartass?" I asked.

"Of course not," he said, his voice toneless again. "I apologize if I offended you."

"Whatever. What were you going to say?"

He waited for a drunk on the road to stumble past and out of earshot before he spoke. "I was going to ask if you wanted to come with me to meet with the mediator."

That's right. He usually went alone. I'd been thinking I'd go with him, but maybe that wasn't necessary. "Do you think he was in on it?"

"That is possible."

I thought for only a moment before saying, "I should come with you. Just in case something happens."

"They don't want to kill me, remember," he said tentatively, apparently still testing the new ground of suggestion-making. It must have been something I hadn't appreciated in the past. "I think it will be safe for me to go alone. If I do think he was a part of it, I can lie and tell him that you're dead."

"Where is he?"

Bruce turned and pointed to a set of stairs that descended below the street on the side of a building. There was a gate at the bottom of it, locked with a padlock. "The Underground. It's the old city that was buried when the new one was built on top. It's mostly empty. The entrances are all locked and only a few people have the keys to get in. It is not dangerous."

I looked him up and down. He was so skinny, and there were still only a few shots left in his gun. "You sure you'll be okay by yourself?"

"Yes. I've been doing this for years, and I've survived so far."

"Well, that's something," I admitted, but I was still uncertain.

"I won't run," Bruce said, tapping his the chip in his chest with a sallow finger.

"I wasn't worried about that," I said. I shrugged. "Alright. Should I meet you somewhere later?"

"Yes. There's a building that we stay in sometimes not far from here."

"Where?"

He took a pencil from his pocket and drew me a crude map. When he was finished he handed it to me and, with a quick nod in farewell, set off down the steps. I watched him open the gate at the bottom, then lock it behind him before disappearing through a dark doorway. I turned my attention back to the torn bit of paper he'd given me. I had to squint at it to make out the marks in the dimming light of the evening.

He said the building's address number was 1106. On the map were intersecting lines indicating roads, a circle where I was, and a square where 1106 was. I glanced at it, oriented myself, and started off in the direction of the building. I looked down at the paper only occasionally, trying not to look like a tourist. It was strange to think that I lived here. Nothing was familiar whatsoever. I didn't remember ever having seen any cities at all, let alone this one. I had a vague knowledge of what they looked like, but I couldn't picture any one in particular. I realized, suddenly, that I didn't remember having seen _anything_ before on any specific occasion. I knew what a baseball hat was, and I could picture it in my head, but I couldn't think of a time when I'd seen one.

It kept crossing my mind that this could all be an elaborate dream, or maybe I was really just a crazy lying in a gutter somewhere and this was all a hallucination. For some reason that sounded more believable than the reality. And maybe everything Bruce had told me was a lie. Maybe he was somebody I'd never seen in my life, and this was all a con, and here I was going along with it like an idiot because I didn't know any better. But for now I didn't really have any options that looked better. I could either trust him or I could go off on my own with no food, no bullets, no caps, no geiger counter, no friends, and no idea where I or anything else was. Neither was a very good choice, but the first option sounded better.

The people thinned out as I neared the building. I could see why we stayed out here; it was on the outskirts of the populated area of the city, just out far enough to be out of the way of most random wanderers. I passed only a few people, many of them wearing green around their arms or heads. I slowed as I passed a small group in an alley. A circle of Leaguers surrounded a moaning figure on the ground. One person drew back her foot and kicked the person in the side, evoking a gasp and cough from the writhing shape. Someone else in the group caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head in a weird half-greeting, half-threat. I shrugged back, and kept walking.

The building was so nondescript that I almost passed it before looking at my map and realizing that it was my destination. It was a few stories tall, square and wedged into the end of the block. It was entirely blue-grey concrete lined with moss and lichen-filled cracks. Vines wound up the wall. Most of the windows were intact, surprisingly. Halfway up the building were lighter marks left by large numbers that had long since been removed: 1106. There were stains streaking from the bottom of each letter where water had gathered and dripped from them, and I could see holes where they'd been secured to the wall.

I pulled on the handle of the door. It didn't move. Locked. I circled around the side of the building. Maybe there was a back door.

There was indeed another door, but it was shut tight as well. I stared at it in confusion. Why would Bruce send me over here if the doors were locked? Maybe someone else had moved in while we were gone.

I remembered the key he'd had for the gate at the bottom of the stairs. I slid a hand into my right pocket, then my left. When I found nothing, I looked down at my pants. They were lined with about as many pockets as would fit on them. I sighed and went through each of them until I finally found a small ring of keys near my left knee. That would explain why I hadn't felt them there before, I suppose; the base of the prosthetic was between it and my skin.

The third key I tried fit the lock, and I went inside and locked it again behind me. There were no windows on the first floor, so I could see little other than the vague shape of some desks and cubicles. I wasn't very worried about there being anyone else inside, considering the trouble I'd had getting in. No one else would bother with a locked building when there were plenty of other open ones around.

There was a staircase in the corner of the room, and I immediately started toward it. _Higher is better,_ something inside me said. _Easier to see everything around you, and harder for people to get to you._ My feet made hardly any noise against the thin carpet of the steps as I continued up to the fifth floor. There wasn't much of interest up there, either. I mostly ignored the room and went straight to the windows to look out. Across from the stairwell was a view of the east, and I could just see the body of water over the tops of the buildings between here and there. I moved to the windows on the right side of the room, and frowned.

There was a flying saucer outside.

Though it wasn't flying, at the moment. It sat on top of a tripod of legs, taller than all the buildings between here and there but not quite as high up as the skyscrapers a few blocks south. It was perhaps a mile away, but I could see it well enough. It leaned precariously to the side. It looked as old as everything else. I stared at it for a long time (expecting it to do something, I guess) but nothing happened.

I turned away from the windows to wander around the fifth floor. It was more empty than the lower ones. There were only three rooms. Two were large single-occupant offices. In between the rooms was a small bathroom. The sink's handle squeaked as I turned it, but no water came out.

I went back out into the first office and set my rifle and pack against the wall. I collapsed into the swiveling chair behind the desk. I spun around in a circle, then skidded my feet on the ground to stop. I looked out the window at the spaceship. I tapped my foot impatiently. This was already boring. I wondered when Bruce would get back. My stomach growled loudly.

There had been paintings in the other office. In this one there were only torn, faded posters that must have been here since before the war. One showed a cat hanging precariously from a branch. Most were of sports cars and tropical beaches. Someone was a bit of an escapist.

I jerked open the top drawer of the desk, and a few pencils and pens rolled to the back of it, over a pile of scribbled-on sticky notes. I shut it and tried the one below it, which revealed a several books, among other things of less interest. I pulled out the books, and held the first one up in the waning light. On the front was someone in a suit holding a briefcase. There were no more pictures on the inside, so I tossed it back into the drawer. The one under that was a pinup magazine, which I paged through before putting it away with the other one. The last book, a flimsy paperback with thin pages, had only a title decorating the front. It didn't look very promising, so I was surprised to find diagrams of various mechanical objects inside. I flipped slowly through it, looking at illustrations of inner workings of cars and radios and, on one page, several types of guns. There was one rifle that looked similar to mine, and I tried to match up the parts on mine to the ones shown on the page.

Soon it was too dark to look at the books anymore, so I put them away and paced through the rooms. My stomach kept growling. I'd already searched most of the building and hadn't found any food. I made a note to bring some extra back later to save for situations like this.

I realized, wandering around, how nervous the waiting was making me. I couldn't pinpoint why. I was starting to feel like I had when I'd first 'awoken'. A cold, creeping fear was working its way through me and getting stronger the longer I waited. This place didn't feel like home. _I _didn't feel like home. It may as well have been on the other side of the world—I wouldn't know the difference. I wished Bruce would come back. The strangeness of everything seemed stronger when he wasn't here.

When I was on the verge of falling asleep, slumped in the swiveling chair, I heard a noise. I jumped. It came again. Someone speaking outside. I could hear the aggression in their tone. I rose from the chair, picked up my rifle, and went down the hall, toward the side of the building that the voice came from. There was a muffled sound as I passed the bathroom, and I paused. I went inside and stood on top of the toilet to see out the small window.

There were three people in the alley below. I could only tell the shorter one was Bruce by that hat. I don't think anyone else would have worn one like it. One of the figures was wrestling him up against the wall. The other one drew a knife as he struggled. It was two of the Leaguers I'd passed earlier. I felt my blood pulsing harder in a surge of outrage and possessiveness. I shoved open the window and stuck the end of my rifle over the sill. I steadied the gun, squinted through the scope, and pulled the trigger. An extremely satisfying crack split the air, though the suppressor held back a good deal of the sound. The gun kicked hard against my shoulder, but somehow I'd known to hook my arm over the window sill to keep myself from falling off the toilet tank.

The one on Bruce fell to the ground, the top half of his head gone. I ejected the casing and instantly shifted my crosshairs to the other and fired again. He didn't have time to turn around before his brain was splattered on the brick behind him.

I watched the body slump to the ground, and smiled.

Then I quickly stopped smiling when I saw Bruce crumpled on the ground with the others. My stomach dropped. I could buy another slave, but I couldn't buy knowledge of my old life back. Right now, that man was serving as memory storage for everything that had happened to me in the past five years.

Then he raised his head to look up at the building. I exhaled slowly. After a moment he seemed to spot me. I gave him a small wave. He got up, searched the corpses, then dragged them one at a time around the corner somewhere. I lost track of him for a minute when he moved out of sight, then I heard a door close downstairs. I pulled my rifle inside, shut the window, and climbed down to go to the other room.

I waited at the top landing as he climbed the stairs slowly. He stopped in front of me. He'd taken his glasses off. Around each eye was a rectangle of clean skin, surrounded by red that covered the rest of his face.

"Uh...you've got some blood," I said, gesturing to his face. He nodded once. I realized he didn't have anything to wipe it off with. "I think there was a towel in the bathroom," I said.

He nodded again. I was about to show him where it was, but he walked by me in its direction before I could. Of course. He already knew where everything was. We'd been here before.

I followed him to the small room and watched as he picked up a disturbingly stiff cloth from the counter and wiped his glasses.

"Who were they? More hunters?"

"No," he replied. "They appeared to be simple thugs."

"Good. They didn't hurt you, did they?" It was hard to tell if any of the blood was his own.

"No."

"Good."

He took off his hat and set it to the side before carefully mopping the blood from his face.

"So how did it go? Looks like no one followed you back this time, at least."

"No," he agreed. "And if they did, they won't be able to get through the doors easily. You may want to stay away from the windows, however."

I hadn't thought of that. I nodded. "We can sleep in the hallway."

"Whatever you want."

I leaned against the doorframe as I watched him wipe his jaw with the towel. After a moment he paused to look up at me questioningly.

"What did the mediator have to say?" I prompted.

He looked down again, picked up the hat, and scrubbed at spots that had been flecked with blood. "I don't think he was involved. The men who took out the contract simply left the contract terms and the caps in a pickup location, so they never had any contact with the mediator face-to-face. He didn't have their names. He seemed very concerned. This is not the type of thing that's good for someone in his line of work. If word about his business gets to the Regulators, they'll probably end up coercing him into helping them, then arresting him when he stops being useful."

I narrowed my eyes. This could be bad. "What if the bounty hunters already told the Regulators?"

"It would be to their benefit to keep it to themselves. They could easily make a lot of money this way if the Regulators keep offering bounties for people who are connected to our mediator."

My stomach growled again. "Did he pay you for that job? The hunters must have given him money for the contract. Even if it was fake, they'd have to give him something."

"I'm sorry to say that he didn't. He said that since we didn't actually complete the contract, he couldn't give us our payment."

I let loose a string of profanity under my breath.

"He did give us another job," Bruce interrupted as he fitted the hat back on his head. The spots on it were now merely dry crimson stains. He picked up his glasses and slid them on. They were still dirty and scratched to hell. His normal vision must have been really bad if it was easier to see when he was wearing those things.

"Yeah?" I said. "Do tell.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

I crouched in the shadow of a house at the top of the hill. The only light came from the moon, but it was bright, washing the city in dim bluish silver. The neighborhood was quiet. I don't think anyone really lived there anymore. Even in the middle of the night there should be sounds—people snoring, toddlers crying, maybe the occasional shout or gunshot from a late-night skirmish.

I yawned, and leaned back against the wall. I could see for miles from where I sat. I was fairly far north of the cluster of skyscrapers now. The surrounding area was purely residential, and rows of houses lined the hill down to the lake. I saw no movement.

I took the rifle from my back with one hand and peered through the scope at the shoreline. There were about a million houseboats down there, but it wasn't as difficult as I'd thought it would be to figure out which was the one I was looking for. Whoever wrote up that contract sure hadn't left anything out. It had taken Bruce about ten minutes to read the entire thing. There were stipulations and exceptions and conditional directions for every possible unforeseen variable, and it was extremely specific in its description of the target, his schedule and tendencies, and how the job should be carried out.

This whole thing had made me nervous at first. Bruce read the contract in the same emotionless way he said everything, almost with a bored air. It was obviously something he'd done many times. But for me it was new, and I wondered whether it would go as smoothly as he seemed to think it would. His revelation that he wouldn't be coming along didn't help anything. He'd assured me that he'd only slow me down and I could handle it on my own.

I hadn't been sure about going alone, but so far this was easy as pie. I suppose I hadn't gotten to the hard part yet.

I stood and replaced the rifle on my back. My stomach hurt as I got up, and my legs felt weak. I really hoped we'd be able to get some food soon. I started down the hill, scanning side to side. I would have liked to just shoot him from there, but the contract was very clear about the necessity for the death to look natural. And I supposed it was important to do this right and keep up my professional reputation, since I seemed to have one.

I picked through a wall of dried brush at the bottom of the hill. When I finally pushed myself through, I was standing on a sidewalk next to the wooden planks of the docks. Most of the neighboring houseboats were tilting dangerously, or had sunk almost completely below the surface of the rippling water. Parts of the dock had been pulled apart or splintered by the weight of the sinking boats, and the walkway seemed to barely be holding itself together.

I crossed the dock, carefully avoiding weaker areas. Once in a while a board creaked under my feet, making me pause to be sure no one heard. I inched my way past boat after boat until I reached the one I was looking for, at the very end of the row.

I stopped before stepping onto the houseboat's deck, waiting for any sign that the occupant was awake. The only thing I could hear was the water lapping at the sides of the boat. I took a tentative step forward, placing one foot on the deck. The boat barely moved as I shifted onto it.

There was a small sound as I tiptoed forward, and I paused at the door. A snore or something. Definitely a sleeping sound. I went to turn the handle, but as I touched the handle, the door swung slowly open under the weight of my hand. I raised an eyebrow at it suspiciously, but slipped inside.

The house consisted of a single room. In the corner was a low bed with an old man sprawled over it, covered in a mountain of blankets. One arm protruded from the shroud, clutching a liquor bottle half-heartedly. Crunched beer cans littered the floor below the bed. The man twitched, and snorted again.

I stood up straight and stared at the man in disbelief, resting a hand on my hip. This was stupid. Without waiting any longer, I strode forward, climbed on top of him, took the pillow from under his head and pressed it down over his face. He didn't even wake up. Idiot.

The bottle he'd been holding fell to the floor with a small _clunk_. Finally I moved away and stood up, taking the pillow away. The man stared blankly at the ceiling. I took the small, boxy camera Bruce had given me out of my pocket and held it up to one eye. There was a click and a flash that filled the room as I snapped the picture, and the thing spat a photo out of its side. It fell out of the camera and drifted to the ground. I picked it up and held it in the moonlight, but nothing had appeared on it yet.

I pocketed the photo and went back to the body. It was sort of eerie the way it hadn't budged. I don't know why I thought it might have. I arranged the body back into the sprawl it had been in when I found it, put the pillow back underneath it, and spread the blankets over it. Then I stepped back to look at the scene. The blankets were too smooth. I leaned forward again to crumple them up a bit. It looked good.

The door made no noise as I opened it and crept outside again. I paused on the dock, looking back at the houseboat. It looked exactly the same as it had before I'd entered it. Five-hundred caps for holding a pillow on some old drunk's face for a few minutes. I picked the right body to wake up in.

I turned and started down the dock toward the hill, and suddenly a board under me creaked loudly. It began to give under my weight, and I hurriedly side-stepped...off the side of the dock.

The water was like liquid ice. I swam to the surface again (no small task in that heavy vest), coughed quietly several times, and quickly moved under the dock. I hung on to a rotting beam to hold myself still while I waited for someone to come and see what had made the splash.

Either no one cared, no one had heard, or this place was even emptier than I'd thought and there was no one around _to _hear. After a minute, I splashed back to the shore and climbed the rocks that lined the bank. My shoes squeaked lightly and left wet marks where I walked. I suppose it didn't matter. The prints would be gone by the next morning.

By the time I got back to 1106 I was freezing, but smiling. We'd get to eat soon.

Bruce was asleep when I came up the stairs. I walked over, squelching over the short carpet, and nudged his shoulder with my foot. "Hey Bruce, look what I got."

He jumped slightly when I touched him. He looked up at me, then reached for his glasses. I pulled out the damp but still visible picture to show to him. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes as he squinted at it, then nodded slowly, like he didn't know how to respond.

"It was some old guy. He didn't even wake up when I came in." I realized only after I said it that the fact kind of bothered me. I didn't know why. It was just so...pathetic. It had been too easy. I shivered suddenly in the cold, and huddled in on myself a little more. "When do we get paid? I'm starving."

"I can get the payment first thing tomorrow." He held out his hand for the picture, and I gave it to him. He held it out from himself for a moment, letting it drip on the floor.

"I fell in," I said simply, answering the question he hadn't asked. He nodded again, and looked up at me expectantly, waiting for me to do something else, I guess. I just shrugged and went to my pack. I pulled out clean(ish) clothes and went to the bathroom to change.

For the first time since I'd awoken the other day, I took off my vest. I felt strangely light as I laid it out over the counter to dry. It was a little uncomfortable, not having the weight there. I didn't like it. But I wasn't going to sleep in a wet, cold, vest.

As I peeled off my shirt, I moved to the other side of the sink to lay it on the counter. I was blinded for a moment when I brought it over my head, and when I pulled it away I was suddenly face-to-face with...a face. I jumped and reached instinctively for my side (which, thanks to the assholes who robbed us, was devoid of any weapons anyhow), until I realized that I was looking at myself in the mirror above the sink. It was the first time I'd seen myself. I'd kept forgetting to look.

I leaned closer to the mirror. My own dark eyes blinked back at me. My skin had been sort of ash-colored before, but now that the dust had been washed off it was nearly black. I lifted a finger to scrub at a spot on my cheek, and the color became even clearer. I wondered when I'd last taken a shower. There were small creases in my skin at the corners of my mouth and in the middle of my forehead—beginnings of wrinkles.

I tilted my head to the side to look at my temple. The threads of stitches over a line of mutilated flesh were just visible in the moonlight coming through the window. I poked at it once. It seemed to be healing alright so far, though getting that lake water in the wound probably hadn't helped anything. I shrugged and wrung out my t-shirt. I pulled on the new one, along with a dry pair of pants.

In the hallway, Bruce was curled on his side with his eyes closed. I shivered again, and considered asking for his coat, but reluctantly discarded the idea. So, it was another cold (but dry) night.

I woke up to the loud echoing of gunshots. I jumped to my feet (well, _foot_, since I'd taken off the prosthetic to let it dry), grabbed my rifle, which still had only one bullet left, and stopped to listen. It was light out. Bruce was gone, I noticed. There were no more shots fired.

I went out into the office next to the stairs and was blinded by the sun streaming through the windows. I quickly moved to the wall next to one window and ducked down, then peeked over the sill. It took me a minute to spot the shooters, on the next street over. One of them stood over a body, a gun propped up against his shoulder. Another one searched the body, and I could see yet another gesturing with a gun and saying something. They shortly left the body and disappeared from view.

I sighed and leaned back against the wall. Bruce must have gone to get the contract money. So I hoped. It seemed strange that I'd let him go around by himself in a place like this, especially considering how badly he'd fared against his attackers last night. But then, I suppose I'd probably bought him with the risk of his death in mind. And he _had _survived making this trek for five years, apparently.

Still, I found myself worrying.

He returned a short while later, and I went to the staircase as soon as I heard the door opening. I'd already gathered all my things and put on my still-damp vest. I heard him stop climbing the stairs when he heard me coming down. Probably for the best. He'd used a lot of Breathe-Easy on the way to the city. He couldn't have had much left.

As I reached the ground floor, it grew darker. The lack of both windows and working lights made it almost impossible to see. It was quiet, and I didn't see anyone anywhere. I stopped on the third step from the floor, scanning the room. "Bruce?" I said, suddenly uneasy.

"Yes," he confirmed, and waved. I could see him standing next to the door now that he moved.

I carefully crossed the room, avoiding desks and chairs. "Where were you? Did you get the money?"

"Yes." He held out a sack. I could hear the caps inside.

"Where can we get food?"

"Pike Place."

"...what place? Is that a street?"

"No. Pike Place Market. It's near the water. I'll take you to it if you'd like."

"Please do."

"May I suggest that you leave your rifle here?"

I frowned. "Too conspicuous?"

He nodded. I unslung the gun from my shoulder and propped it against the wall. Then something else occurred to me. "Do we usually both do shopping together?"

"No."

"Just you."

"Usually. Sometimes you go. But we rarely go to highly-populous, public places together. It makes us harder to identify, and harder to connect with each other, if we're not always seen together." He tilted his head to the side as he looked at me. "Would you prefer it if I went alone?"

"No," I said, without having to think about it very long. "If we run into those bounty hunters again it'll be better if both of us are there to deal with them."

He nodded again, slightly more emphatically than usual, and I got the impression that he agreed.

"Give me your gun," I said as we left the building. "And your hat," I added. It would probably be better if everyone wasn't asking questions about my head wound.

He handed me both, and locked the door behind us.

"Do you think we _will_ run into the hunters again?"

"I don't know," he said, starting toward the ocean. "It's possible."

I grunted a vague insult toward the mysterious hunters. "You didn't see what they looked like?"

"I caught a glimpse of a Caucasian man with black hair."

I snorted. "That helps a lot."

He didn't reply. I glanced down at him after a moment. It was kind of strange how quiet he was. He never really talked back. I think even slaves were supposed to do that sometimes. It wasn't really the type of thing I wanted to ask him about, so I didn't bring it up.

Pike Place was a weird system of tunnels and brick walkways on the hill next to the viaduct. A long section of it was half indoor, half outdoor, along the street. The rest was built into a structure that extended out beyond the slope of the hill to be held up by stilts in some areas, and descended underground in others.

It was the most crowded place I'd seen so far, and I actually had to weave through the crowd as we walked down the sheltered strip next to the road. Vendors lined both sides of the walkway, selling everything from bullets to moldy cheese to tiny little models of that flying saucer I'd seen from the window at 1106. From one section of wall hung a large modified plasma rifle with a spotlight shining on it. A salesman barked about it enthusiastically to a small group of gawking kids. Regulators patrolled the hall, scanning the crowd suspiciously. They didn't look at me twice when we passed. Someone ran by me, shoving me as they went. I stumbled into a table set up along the wall, and was almost immediately shoved away again by a gauntleted arm.

"Keep away from the merchandise," said the man (who was apparently a guard) in bored way. I ignored him, distracted by the table next to him that was covered in guns and other weapons. At a glance, they looked like they were good quality. I turned to tell Bruce, but he was already several yards ahead of me. I hurried to catch up to him, not wanting to be left behind. He seemed to have a particular place in mind.

Eventually we got through the corridor and the crowd thinned somewhat. At the cross section of passages, Bruce took a turn down a stairway with a neon arrow hanging above it, pointing down. I followed him under the sign, then around a corner and down a ramp to an even lower level.

The merchant we went to first was out of the way, in his own room off the hallway, but his stock was surprisingly good; better than what the guy with the pushy guard upstairs had been selling. I bought a geiger counter, a couple stimpaks, and enough ammunition to last us a few months if we used it sparingly, along with a long, sturdy knife. There were several varieties of handguns, but the only submachine gun had pieces missing and wasn't functional, so I reluctantly decided to wait for that purchase. I'm not sure why I was so set on an SMG. The other ones the man showed me somehow just didn't feel quite right in my hand.

With my pack 200 some caps lighter, I followed Bruce back into the hallway. He walked silently up the ramp and down a series of corridors, not bothering to check if I was following him. A few minutes later we came to a flimsy door in the wall in the middle of a narrow hall. I slipped inside behind Bruce.

The room beyond the door was a lot bigger than I'd been anticipating. The other shop we'd gone to barely qualified as a walk-in closet, and we had been the only ones there. This one consisted of several rooms, and there were enough people there to fill more than half of the tables and bar seats, though it was quiet for the number of people there.

We got food, then went through the archway at the end of the bar, into the other room. It was a little darker in there, and there were fewer people. I saw, too late, a familiar overcoat and cowboy hat on someone lounging in the corner. But I couldn't turn back now, it would be suspicious to leave as soon as I saw the Regulator. I went and sat down at the table in the opposite corner, instead. There were only a few other people scattered in the room. A couple on one wall was speaking in low voices. I couldn't hear more than a few scattered words. That was reassuring. If I couldn't hear them, they couldn't hear me.

The Regulator was a bit on the slender side. It might have been a woman, I decided. Her head was tipped low enough that I couldn't really see much of her face. She was leaning back in her chair with her feet propped on the table in front of her.

I chomped absently on a chunk of meat, my hunger nearly forgotten as I stared at the regulator. "Have we had much trouble with them before?" I asked Bruce, nodding to the woman. "Any close calls?"

"Not one," he replied quietly. He took an apple from his pocket and took a bite. "Not with them. Not since I've been with you," he said when he finished chewing.

"We have to find those bounty hunters."

"I agree."

I sighed. "Is there any way we could get a list or something of the hunters who work with the Regulators?"

"No." He swallowed another bite of apple. "Unless you want to ask them," he added.

As I watched the Regulator, she reached over to her table to pick up a bottle of beer. In tilting her head back to take a drink, she revealed a patchwork of skin over stringy red muscle.

"They let ghouls in here?" I said quietly.

Bruce nodded. "I've seen a few here before. The owner says, 'the caps all spend the same'."

"I guess."

"It would be unwise of him to turn away a Regulator. Most merchants are glad to have them around."

I finally looked away from the woman.

"Ma'am..."

I focused back on Bruce. He was looking at the wall behind me. I turned. It was a bunch of papers tacked to a piece of wood hanging on the wall. "What?"

He pointed to a paper with a big title across the top and a bunch of smaller writing underneath. "That's your bounty," he said, very quietly.

I took the paper down from the wall. "Have you seen this before?"

"I knew the bounty was out, but I have not seen the actual document."

"How long ago did they release it?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "Almost six months, maybe."

"But those guys from the other day were the first ones to find us."

"Yes."

I handed him the paper. "What does it say? How much do they know?"

He crunched another bite of apple as he scanned it, hunched over with the paper a few inches from his face. For some reason the pose made him look several years younger than he was. There was something about him that was distinctly childlike. I noticed it on some occasions more than others. The effect was greater when he had the big hat on. It made him look small in comparison.

"It says...that there are two of them, possibly more," he began. "Weapons of choice are a 50 caliber long range rifle, a 10mm submachine gun, a shotgun with buckshot ammunition, and a knife, approximately eight inches long. They are skilled in hand-to-hand fighting and are accurate when shooting. One of them is likely a slave." He nodded slightly in acknowledgement of the statement. "They most likely frequent Pike Place. They may have a residence in the south end of Pioneer Square, and they primarily operate at night."

"Fuck. That's more than I thought they'd have."

"It's not as bad as it sounds. Everyone carries guns. People aren't likely to notice the ones we have in particular, especially if you keep the sniper rifle out of sight. And everyone frequents Pike Place."

"What about that pioneer thing?"

"We did have a place we went to in Pioneer Square, but we haven't been there in a while."

"We'll have to keep not being there."

"Yes. We can stay where we are and find another residence if necessary. We can also travel through the Underground if we need to lie low. The regulators don't watch it closely." His eyes moved silently across the page for a while longer. Then he read, "It is preferable that they be taken alive. If not, proof of death and proof of guilt must be provided to receive payment."

"How much payment?"

"Three thousand caps. With a deduction of one thousand five hundred if the slave is killed, and five hundred more if the others are killed."

"I thought it'd be more than that." I bit into a piece of seaweed thoughtfully. "They're serious about the part about not killing you, though."

"It seems so."

"That's nice," I said appreciatively. Though it was still a little difficult to think of people who had a hit out on me as 'nice'.

Bruce continued to read the paper more thoroughly, and I waited for him to conjure up anything else of note about it. I ignored the pair of booted feet crossing the floor, assuming they were aiming to go through the archway near us, until they came to a stop beside our table and my geiger counter started clicking faintly.

I looked up. The Regulator stood over us.

"That reward still hasn't been claimed. If you're interested," she said in a low but steady voice.

So they hadn't turned in a photo of us yet. As I'd suspected, but it was good to hear nonetheless. "Oh yeah?" I said, seeing an opportunity. "I think I remember someone talking about this. I heard they had a lead. That didn't go through?"

"Nope," she said. She pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat next to us. "Where'd you hear that?"

I shrugged. "You know, through the grapevine."

"Are you a merc, then?" She nodded to my vest. "Looks like you're expecting trouble."

"You never know," I said with a smile. "And I'm more of just a bounty hunter, really."

"You haven't seen that one yet?" the Regulator asked. "It's been posted for a while."

"I'm from out of town."

"Ah." She smiled a small smile, for no particular reason that I could see. She turned to Bruce. "And who are you? Partner in crime?"

I'd never seen someone directly addressing him like that, asking a question. I wondered what his reaction would be.

He only glanced at me for a fraction of a second. "Yes."

"Any idea where we should start looking?" I interjected. "Or who else has been working on this? They'd be easier to find if we pooled information."

She shook her head. "All the information we have is on that paper. If we knew more, I'd be going after them myself. Most of us haven't looked into that case in a while, if you want to know the truth. We keep getting more victims and no new leads. It's a bit demoralizing."

I tried to look disappointed. Which wasn't actually too hard, since that still left us at square one with the whole 'finding the people who tried to kill me and are probably now walking around with a picture of me' thing. It was looking like the only way we were going to be able to find them was if they came to us.

"That's not to say you couldn't do it," the Regulator added. "We haven't had any luck with the hunters so far, but most of the outside help we get...well...the numbers are useful, but they don't tend to be the best and brightest. Detective work isn't really their forte."

I was starting to dislike this woman a tiny bit less. She was probably right, at least about the people who'd shot me. Admittedly, they had been able to find me, and that was more than could be said for anyone else. But they hadn't even been able to kill me properly, and I was guessing that the reason they hadn't gone in for the reward yet was that 'proof of guilt' line in the paper. It seemed like they hadn't really thought this whole thing through before they did it.

The Regulator glanced at the paper. "You know what they're calling him? The merc?"

_I'm called something?_ "No."

She smiled again. "Stille_._"

I raised an eyebrow. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know." She cleared her throat, leaning an elbow on the table behind her. "A while back, we found one of the victims a few minutes after the murderer got to him. He died hardly more than a few seconds after we arrived. Everyone kept asking him, 'Who did it? Who attacked you? What did he look like?' He was mostly gone by then. All he said was, 'stille'." She shrugged, smirking. "No one knows what he was talking about, but it caught on."

"You were there?" I said.

"Oh yes. You can't go chasing the one of the biggest menaces to public safety in Seattle without the chief of the county's Regulator branch."

"How many branches have you got, exactly?"

"Lots. We're scattered all across the northern states, all the way down to the lower east coast."

"And how does a ghoul woman become the chief of a Regulator branch, if you don't mind me asking?"

She threw her head back and laughed, once. "A lot of goddamn work, that's how." She stood, pushing the chair back under the table behind her. "You should know that you'll have competition, if you decide to go find him. Not just from other bounty hunters, but from me. I've had it out for that scum for a long time now, and I still look in on his case now and again." She looked me in the eye, and I could have sworn she was looking right through me. "Still. I wish you luck."

"Thanks."

She tipped her hat and left through the archway. She didn't ask me my name, and never told me hers.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

I wrapped the leftover food in a cloth and put it in my backpack for later. We dropped off the plates at the counter as we left, earning a wave and a smile from the proprietor, who was now attending to other customers.

We went through the dimly-lit halls in a different direction than the way we'd come, toward the back of the market. The farther away we got from the street a few floors above, the fewer people there were. We finally exited onto a deck over the hill between the market and the water, and followed it back to the street. I looked out at the ocean. The other day the sun had reflected off the mirror-like water with a glare that made it hard to look at. Now the sun had gone, hidden by an even, grey sheet of clouds, and the water was dark and dull grey-blue to match. The grey cast seemed to have fallen over the entire city during the short time we'd spent inside the market.

There was another throng of people milling about the street we came out on. I wondered if I knew any of them. Had I had friends in my previous life, besides Bruce? I supposed he didn't count as a friend, though.

I bet I'd had plenty of enemies. The general public, for one, judging from the tone the paper and that Regulator had had. Luckily most of them didn't know who I was or what I looked like, but I still couldn't help being a little on edge around so many people after reading the bounty.

A few blocks away from the market, I looked back down the street. Most people were hanging around close to the market, or around the buildings across the street, or in the flat area at the far end that probably used to be a park, but now served as a foundation for a small village of tents. Someone a couple blocks behind us with a rifle over one shoulder turned down a side street as I looked back.

"When do you think a new contract will be ready?" I asked Bruce, turning back to him.

"There's no way to tell when it will be available, but you average about one contract per two weeks. It could come in at any time. Would you like me to go check if there are any available yet?"

"No. I don't want to do anything today." _And I don't want to be by myself._ I briefly wondered how I made enough money to keep us both fed. We'd just spent most of our caps and we had barely enough food to last a few days, let alone two weeks. Oh well. We'd cross that bridge when we came to it.

We turned a corner (rather, Bruce did, and I followed him), and I caught a glimpse of the couple figures on the street behind us as we did. We were just about the only people on the street. The population of the city seemed extremely centered on the middle of downtown. I liked it better on the edge. It was too hard to find landmarks in the middle of all those skyscrapers. They all looked the same, and they all blocked the view of everything beyond them. I would've been completely lost if Bruce wasn't there.

We passed a monster of a building that had at some point collapsed sideways into the building next to it, forming a sort of tunnel through the alley below it. The top half of the building curved under its own weight, looking like it might fall at any moment. A crow sitting on a cracking, sideways window sill cocked its head to point one shiny black eye at me. I stared back. Suddenly the bird flew off, leaving flakes of paint and concrete to crumble to the ground in its wake. I turned to watch it fly down the street behind us, and in doing so saw the three people a block behind us. As I looked back at them, the one in the center, the same figure with a rifle that I'd seen as we were leaving Pike Place, moved a hand like he was gesturing as he talked. None of them looked at me. I turned away from them.

"Keep walking, don't turn around," I said quietly as I caught up with Bruce. He didn't. "Did you see the people behind us?" I asked.

He stared straight ahead. "I did not."

"Three of them. They all have guns."

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye while I looked at him. I realized, after a moment, that each of us was looking to the other for direction.

"Turn right into the next alley," I decided.

He turned, and I followed. I touched his arm to get him to stop just around the corner. On the wall of the opposite building was a round mirror angled so that I could see down the sidewalk we'd just been on. Probably used to be for traffic, but now it was serving as a very convenient way for me to check on the progress of the people behind us. They sped up, assuming that they were out of view now.

I hurried farther down the alley until the wall bent in on itself and opened abruptly into a wider parking lot between the two buildings. Several dumpsters and an eroded car clogged the way. There were fire escapes on the walls of both buildings. "Up there," I said, pointing to the one on the opposite wall, which had a more ornate (meaning, better for hiding behind) railing. "Go. Don't attack unless I do."

Bruce quickly started climbing the ladder. I leaned around the corner, but couldn't see into the mirror from the angle I was at. I retreated to the alley and wedged myself between a dumpster and the wall, then held still. There was a soft metallic tapping from the fire escape, and the sound of Bruce cocking the shotgun, then silence.

In a few moments I could hear them coming through the alley. They didn't speak. I listened to footsteps come closer, then get farther away. The three went slowly to the end of the alley and paused there. I edged closer, taking cover behind the next dumpster, then the one after that. I took out my new knife from its sheath. I paused when I was several yards away from them. They went out to look around the corners, then came back to the mouth of the alley.

"...sure it was them?" someone was saying timorously.

"Yeah, it was them," said another man, this one with a lower voice.

"I shot that Amazon in the head," came a female voice. "She was down."

Blood pounded in my ears. I clutched the handle of my knife tighter.

"Not down enough."

"What if they're still here?" said the quiet voice again. "She saw us."

"They don't know what we look like," said the woman again. "Even if they saw us, they wouldn't know who we are. Anyway, they're not exactly the most observant of people. I don't think they looked back once when we were following them out east."

They were moving back into the alley now. I slid around the corner of the dumpster, behind them.

"Do you think...do you think we should go to the Regulators?" the quiet one asked.

"No, you idiot," said the woman. She was mere feet away from me now. She leaned on the dumpster with one arm. "What do you think they'll say when we show them a picture of someone we killed with no proof to use against them?"

"There's nothing they can do to find us," said the bigger man. "We have the advantage. We'll wait at Pike until they..."

The woman reached behind her to scratch a spot on her back with her thumb. I thrust an arm out, grabbed her hand, and jerked her backwards. As she stumbled sideways I shoved the knife into her side, between her front and back plates of armor and two ribs. She made a strained noise and, after a second of shock, reached for her gun. I ripped the knife out, making her movements stutter again, and stabbed it into her neck. There was a wet crunch, and she made a pathetic sound as her legs gave out from under her.

As I dealt with the woman there came the report of a shotgun, and the sound of a body hitting the ground. There was a scrambling of feet and another shot from Bruce, but he apparently missed. The last person left hurried around the other side of the dumpster. He waited there. I snorted. Idiot. I picked up the almost-dead woman and held her in front of me like a shield. Then I stepped around the corner to the back side of the dumpster. The person shot again, and the woman choked wordlessly as she took the bullet for me. I threw her forward and she collided with the man—the quiet one, by the look of him. He stumbled out into the open, and as he tried to raise his gun again I swept my arm up to block his. As I moved the gun away from me, I drove the blade up under his chin. He dropped the gun as his entire body convulsed in pain. I slashed him again across the throat, then simply pushed him away from the dropped gun to let him bleed out on his own.

It was quiet for a minute. I looked up at Bruce. He was still aiming his gun through the bars on the railing of the fire escape. He looked at me for a moment, then sheathed the weapon and started down the stairs.

The woman gave a choking wheeze. I looked down at her. She was, miraculously, still alive. I bent down over her. She coughed again, and gave me what was probably a hateful glare. I picked up the gun the other man had dropped, and finished her off.

I tossed the smoking gun to the side and looked down at her thoughtfully. Somehow I felt less satisfaction than I'd thought I would when this moment came. Now my most urgent problem was solved, but I still had a hole in my head, and it still hurt. I still had no name, and no past. Nothing had changed that.

Not yet, at least. It just needed time. It'd come back. I can't lie—the thought of her, of the person I'd been before, returning to reclaim her body made my heart sink. I knew it was stupid. I was the same person, surely?

There was one reason I tolerated the thought of regaining my memory: something felt strange. Something was wrong. Like I was lost. I felt it most when I was alone, but I could always feel it there, lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. And I felt it now. An emptiness. Remembering, I thought, must be the cure.

Bruce approached from behind me.

I looked up, drawn away from my thoughts. "Well, that's one less thing to worry about," I said conversationally.

"I'll check that one," he said, gesturing to the man he'd shot.

"Fine."

The woman had a submachine gun. Ten millimeter. She'd never even gotten it out of the holster. That lightened my mood a bit. I unstrapped the holster and slid it over my own shoulders, not quite believing my luck. I took all the extra clips and bullets she had, then moved to the other man. Neither of them had any photos that I could see. I went to see what Bruce had found.

He'd shot the man in the head. I was surprised he had such good aim. "Hey, you didn't hit me this time," I noted with a smirk. "Nice job."

"You didn't move into the way this time," he replied. I raised my eyebrows at him. He carefully kept his gaze fixed on the man whose pockets he was going through. I wasn't sure whether he was trying to be smart or was simply being matter-of-fact. It was probably both. I didn't respond.

After a minute, he pulled a square of paper out of one of the man's pockets. He looked at it, then held i tout to me. I took it reverently, knowing what it was. I held the picture at arm's length, as though it might be dangerous for it to get too close.

The photo was slightly blurry, but it was me. No doubt about it. I was sprawled in the dirt with my eyes shut, blood darkening the dirt around my head. Bruce's limp arm stuck into the corner of the photo a few feet away from my body.

I tucked the photo into my pocket. "Anything else?"

He pointed to the rifle on the man's back. I pushed the corpse to the side to check it out. I didn't need the gun. The jacket he was wearing, on the other hand... It looked like it might almost fit me. It would be long enough to cover my vest during the day and be warm at night. And it was black, to boot. It would match my current wardrobe, at least.

I relieved the man of the jacket and slid it on. It fit almost perfectly.

I took the guns and caps from all three of the hunters. I didn't plan on keeping the guns, but it was probably better to make it look like they'd been killed in robbery.

"You got everything you want?" I asked Bruce.

"Yes."

"Back to 1106, then," I said, gesturing for him to lead the way.

We dumped the hunters' stuff in a cardboard box in an alley on the way home. It would be gone within a few hours, I was sure. I looked over my shoulder every few seconds, but we managed to cross the rest of the distance to the building without anyone else trying to tail us.

Inside 1106 I trudged up the stairs to the top floor, dropped my pack on the floor, and slumped into the swiveling chair behind the desk. Something wet touched my neck, and I realized there was blood on the collar of the jacket. I folded it in so the stain wasn't touching me.

Bruce paused in the doorway. I suddenly realized I was still wearing his hat. I took it off and set it on the desk. He stepped forward to retrieve it. "Is there anything else you need me to do?" he said as he pulled on the furry mass.

"No."

He nodded politely and exited the room, moving to the other office through the hall.

I watched him go, then swiveled in the chair to look out the window. The spaceship hadn't moved, and was no more or less tilted on its spindly legs than it had been before. I went to the window and looked out. I was surprised to see someone on the sidewalk below our building. He knelt on the concrete in front of an electrical box. I watched curiously as he jumped and yanked his arm back, apparently having been shocked. He reached for something on the ground, then went back to the box. I could see the green on his left arm when he moved.

I turned away from the window and started down the stairs. "I'll be back in a minute," I said to Bruce, not sure whether it was customary for me to alert him of things like that. He nodded in acknowledgement.

I went out the back door and circled around a few buildings before doubling back, so it wouldn't be obvious where I was coming from. There was no one else on the street as I approached the man in front of our building. He had a toolbox on the ground next to him. He looked up in surprise as I approached him. He'd been concentrating on the box and didn't see me until I stopped a few feet away. He looked me up and down with narrowed eyes.

"Hey," I said casually, and some of the tension left his face. He was young. Younger than Bruce, even.

He returned his attention to the box. It was a convoluted mess of wires and plugs. I wondered how he made sense of it. "Hey."

"What's going on here?"

He glanced up again. "You live here?"

"Yeah." I made a vague gesture in the direction I'd come from.

He gave me a small smile as he tore a damaged wire out of the box and retrieved one from his toolbox to replace it. "If it's within a mile of here, then you're getting power."

"Electricity?" I said, frowning.

"That's right. Congratulations."

"There's enough power that you can spare some for this block? Hardly anyone even lives here. Is it really worth it?"

He nodded. "They got another turbine running in one of the Skagit River dams. There's practically an excess."

"I'd rather have running water," I admitted.

The man smirked. "Kind of ironic, isn't it? No clean water to be found in 'The Rainy City'. We've got people working on that, too, but I wouldn't bank on that problem being solved in your lifetime. The pre-war water treatment plants aren't built for filtering radiation, you know? If you're going to drink anything, though, the sea water is better than the stuff from the lake. Filter out the salt and it's relatively healthy. The radiation's less concentrated there than it is in the fresh water around here."

I nodded absently at the advice, but I wasn't really paying attention to that part. "'We'? The League, you mean?"

"Who else?" He gasped and jumped again as something sparked and shocked him. He muttered a curse.

"What do you get out of that?"

"What do you mean?"

I shrugged. "Why does the League spend resources on electricity for other people? Not everyone in this area is a Leaguer."

He stopped his work to look up at me with a bemused smile. "Well...that's the whole point. What, have you been living under a rock or something?"

"I'm from out of town."

"We used to be raiders." He paused. "I mean, _I_ didn't, I wasn't around then. But that's how it started out. The League was founded by a raider, about fifty years ago. When he and his tribe found their way here, the Regulators were already here. We couldn't fight them, so we had to either leave or change, otherwise we'd have ended up like that pathetic lot to the south. We chose the latter, obviously."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "It's a valuable city, and it's unclaimed by any other factions, other than the Regulators, but they don't care about governing, really. The NCR is busy fighting over territory in the South and the Enclave never made it this far north. There are a lot of untapped resources, natural and man-made, and the bombs mostly missed it. Have you ever been to the eastern half of the state?"

I shook my head, though that was where I'd been when I woke up, as far as I remembered.

"During the war, there was a Chinese plane that was supposed to bomb Seattle. Something went wrong, and they dropped the nukes too late. They hit up in the mountains instead of here. Good for us, I guess. Anyway, it took a while, but eventually the League got bigger and bigger and more organized. Now it's led by a guy named Anton, and he's made it better than ever. We want to make the city what it was before the war, and that starts here." He nodded to the box in front of him.

After a few more moments of tinkering, he did something that made a loud clicking noise. Something changed in the periphery of my vision, and I looked up at 1106. Several floors were lit up. I smiled. "Hey, look at that."

The Leaguer shut the door on the box and fastened a padlock around the latch. He smiled back as he picked up his toolbox and stood. "Yeah. Pretty cool, huh?" He eyed me again, his gaze alighting on my vest and the grip of the gun which was now slung under my arm and just showing beyond the edge of my jacket. "Hey, you should think about joining. We could always use another gun."

"I will." I wouldn't. "Thanks."

"See you around."

"Yeah." I didn't move as I watched him leave. When he was at the end of the block, he turned out of sight. I looked around to check if anyone else was watching, then reentered 1106 straight through the front door.

I took the stairs two at a time, stopping at every floor to turn off all the lights. The ones at the top floor I left on. I strode into the far office, where Bruce sat cross-legged on the floor with a book in his lap. He looked up as I entered. He didn't say anything.

I gestured excitedly at the lights. He nodded once. I slowly lowered my arms. I'd thought he would be more excited than that.

I turned away from him to go to the window. The view wasn't as good from this room. I couldn't see the ocean or the space ship. There was only the narrow street below, lined with long-dead, frail, twiggy trees, and a grimy glass-sided building across the street. I smiled when I saw the Leaguer crossing the street a ways away, toolbox in hand. He tripped over a crack or something in the middle of the road and almost fell. He caught himself in time and cast a glare behind him at the tiny obstacle.

He started toward an intersection, but suddenly stopped. He watched something that was out of my line of sight. Then he dropped the box, turned, and ran back the way he'd come. It was only a moment before I saw what he was running from—three ragged-looking people brandishing pipes and, in one case, what looked like a candlestick. I swore, drawing my handgun and aiming it out the window.

"Get my rifle," I said to Bruce.

He looked up, but didn't move. I took my eyes off the people outside to glance at him. He was staring at me in a puzzled way.

"_Go get it!_" I shouted, and he leapt up like he'd been stabbed with a pin. The book he'd been holding went flying as he ran down the hall. I looked back out the window. The Leaguer's attackers were gaining on him. As one of them raised his weapon above his head, I fired, and the pipe fell from his grip as he dropped to the ground. The Leaguer ducked at the sound of the shots, covering his head with his arms.

"Keep running, idiot," I muttered hopefully. Bruce returned, proffering the rifle. I dropped the SMG and grabbed it without looking at him. Thrusting the end of the gun out the window, I cocked it, took aim, and fired again as soon as the woman with the candlestick moved through my crosshairs.

And there was that sound again. Almost cathartic.

The last person had realized what was happening, and had abandoned the chase, turning and running the other way. I followed him with the scope, but didn't fire yet. In a sudden onset of maliciousness, I waited until he was nearly to the corner at the intersection, when he must have thought he was surely going to make it. Then I pulled the trigger again. He collapsed, halfway around the building on the corner.

I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the soft echoes of the discharge of the gun.

"Ma'am," Bruce said quietly, and I snapped to attention again. I looked out the window, and realized that the Leaguer had found where the shots were coming from. He was on the ground looking up at our window. I withdrew the rifle and shut the window. I set the gun on the ground beside my other one, and sat against the wall next to the window.

"Fuck," I muttered. It was quiet again. I glanced out the window, and the Leaguer was walking back down the street to pick up his toolbox, looking anxiously to and fro into the alleys and dark corners around him.

"I hate that," I said bitterly. "He wasn't even carrying a weapon. It's pathetic, attacking someone who can't defend themselves."

It was quiet for a time. Then Bruce spoke, quietly.

"You did kill a man in his sleep yesterday," he pointed out.

I frowned in confusion. _Oh yeah._ _I did._

I blinked at the floor. I wondered what had prompted me to say that. It didn't really make sense. Suddenly my mind felt blank.

Bruce moved, and I looked up at him. He stiffened under my gaze, and didn't seem to be breathing. Clearly he expected to be punished for talking like that.

"So I did," I said simply.

He relaxed slightly, but watched me warily.

I narrowed my eyes. "What is this?" I asked him. "You're testing me?"

He had no reply to this, unsurprisingly.

I turned away from him, which he seemed to take as a dismissal. He picked up his book and sat against the opposite wall to go back to his reading. I watched the Leaguer turn a corner outside and disappear, then wandered through the hallway back to the other office. Everything looked different in the light that poured from the white rectangles on the ceiling. Mainly, I could see more clearly how dirty everything was. The posters on the walls were lit with a new luminescence that made the room an oasis of color in an otherwise grey and brown world. I could see why we'd left them up, despite the mostly insipid subject matter.

I tried to distract myself from what I'd said a few minutes ago, but it didn't work. Like always, trying not to concentrate on it just made me think about it more.

I'd _never_ thought like that, like what I'd said before, so far as I remembered. I wasn't even thinking about it when I said it. It was like I was possessed.

=I rubbed a hand over my eyes with a sigh. I went back to the other office.

"What do I do for fun, anyway?" I asked Bruce.

"You kill people."

"That's not all that fun. That's work. What do I do when I'm not working?"

He shrugged uncertainly. I looked around the room. There were a neat lines of books along one wall. Ones Bruce had collected, I suppose. At least _he'd_ found something to occupy himself with.

My eyes ran along the wall, but stopped when I came to something square sticking out from behind a cabinet. I went over to it and picked it up, dusting it off. It didn't appear to have been moved for years, maybe longer. It was a flat board covered in brown and yellowish squares (though the latter had probably been white at one point). I think I knew what it was. I held it up so Bruce could see. "This is a game, isn't it?"

"It's a chess board."

"Do you know how to do it?"

His mouth twitched down a bit as he figured out what I was going to ask next. "Yes."

"You don't want to play?"

He didn't say anything.

"Come on," I said. "It'll be fun. Help me find the pieces." I opened the cabinet it'd been set behind to begin my search.

Bruce slowly set down the book on one of the rows next to him and stood to help me look. After a few minutes, he located the pieces in a plastic bag in a drawer. After setting them all up the way he showed me, we found that there were several pieces missing, so we replaced them with bottle caps and empty shell casings.

It took Bruce a long time to explain all the rules. The game was more complicated than I'd thought it would be, but he was patient. But after a few minutes of playing, everything seemed to fall together and it became easier and easier. I lost several pieces straight off, but quickly caught up, and soon we both had large collections of each other's pawns in piles at either end of the board.

I frowned as Bruce took my queen, and was beginning to worry that I'd lose. I chanced moving a bishop all the way across the board, in line with his own. He immediately took it. I was surprised he fell for that. In the space that was created, I moved my rook across the board to sit next to his king.

"Oh. You win," he said.

"Want to go again?" I asked.

He shrugged and began setting up the pieces again.

I grew a little suspicious when I won the second game, as well. I didn't say anything this time, but wordlessly began setting the pieces up again. He followed suit.

I played deliberately badly this time. Bruce seemed to lower his level of play to meet mine, and again we both collected roughly the same number of each other's pieces. Finally, when there were only a few pieces left on the board, I moved my queen away from its protective position next to my king in order to take a pawn on the other side of the board. This left a clear path from his rook to my king.

He studied the board, then moved the rook to take my queen, instead. I reached out and took the rook from him before he could complete the move. He looked up at me in surprise. I dragged the rook back to my king, knocking over the taller piece and scooting the rook into its place.

I took my hand away and looked up at Bruce to watch his reaction. He stared at the board.

"Did you miss that?" I asked.

"Yes."

_Liar_. Was he really so afraid of what I'd do if I lost? Would I throw a fit? I certainly wouldn't now. But what about my previous self? "Do you think I'm stupid?"

A pause. "No." This time he wasn't lying.

As I watched, a flicker of annoyance crossed his face. At least, I think it did. He was always hiding behind those damn glasses. I could never see him properly. I never knew what he was thinking.

I reached toward him suddenly, and he flinched. I took hold of one of the lens frames and pulled it away from him as I'd done when we first met. I held the glasses by one earpiece and twirled them in a circle as I looked at his face. He was trying to restrain whatever he was feeling, I could tell, but I could see it nonetheless. I watched the fear drain from his dark eyes, to be replaced by a cold, contemptuous stare. I stopped twirling the glasses.

It was a look of hate. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was, nonetheless. I folded the glasses and set them down on the board. Bruce picked them up and held them protectively, but didn't put them back on.

I half had the urge to tell him off, or...or do _something_ to him for looking at me like that, but the guilt was enough to stop me. Because didn't know what I'd done to him to make him look at me like that. The way he was so careful and reserved around me gave room for little explanation other than that I'd hurt him. I didn't think he was enough of a coward to act like that for no reason.

I was being an idiot, of course. I wanted him to be a friend. He was all I had since I lost my memory, and he was the closest thing to a companion that I had. But he couldn't be my slave and my friend. It was one or the other. And my previous incarnation had already chosen for me. So slave it was.

I got up, stepping around the chess board, and left him to himself.


	7. Chapter 7

_It may or may not be obvious that I have a massive phobia of underwater wreckage. Let me tell you, I did not like that airplane thing in New Vegas. You know what I'm talking about. Didn't like that at all, nope. Sorry about the excessive description and etcetera, anyway. This scene is self-indulgence. _

* * *

**Chapter 7**

The only reason I survived the next several days was the discovery of a yellow portable radio in the basement of the building. Only one station came in; something called KIRO, so announced the DJ. I didn't much like the music they played, but it was better than the radio dramas, which were, in turn, better than nothing. I am fairly sure I would have died of boredom without that thing, now that I'd resolved to stop bothering Bruce to entertain me.

It was more than a relief when Bruce went to meet the mediator and came back with a new contract. This one wasn't as strict as the last had been, though it was more unusual, or so he told me. The contract, strangely, did not ask me kill anyone, but wanted me to retrieve some object. It offered me five-thousand caps to do it.

I cheered at that. "Five-_thousand_? We won't have to work for weeks!" Then I frowned. That wasn't exactly something to look forward to. But at least we'd be able to eat. "What do I have to do?"

"You are to go to the beached battleship off the coast of the north of the city and recover the mini-nuke launcher stowed on it."

I raised my eyebrows. "A mini-nuke launcher? Who commissioned this job? The League?"

Bruce glanced down to check the paper he held. "It doesn't say."

"Well, I guess we'll just have to hope that whoever we're giving it to is someone we like. Why aren't they just doing it themselves, anyway?"

"I don't know. But I'd guess it has to do with the superstitions people have about that particular ship."

"You know which ship they're talking about?"

"Yes. It's a well-known landmark. It's rumored to be haunted."

I snorted.

"There is reason for the rumors. There have been plenty of attempts to raid the ship for fuel and weaponry. As far as I know, no one who has gone there has ever come back alive."

"Did they come back dead?" I quipped.

He didn't laugh_._

"Where is it?"

He drew a line in pencil on an old map of the city that we'd obviously used many times before. There were other pencil and pen markings all over it, some erased so that only a shadow of them remained. The place he showed me didn't look hard to get to, but it was a few miles away.

Later that night I left, and after two hours and several wrong turns, I was on the small peninsula that was the closest part of the city to the ship. There was no beach—only a small outcropping of rocks that I had to climb over to get to the shore. It must have been high tide. The dark water came right up to the rocks. I followed the swells with my eyes out toward the horizon, and stopped when I saw the ship.

I sighed. It was at least five hundred yards from the shore. When Bruce said 'beached', I'd assumed he meant 'on the beach'. How was I supposed to get out there? There was no way I could swim that far.

There was a wooden sound below me, and I looked down. Tied to a metal post sticking out of the rocks was a canoe, bouncing against the rocks in the gentle waves.

"A-ha," I said quietly. I didn't know whether it had been placed there by my contract-giver or if it was just a coincidence, but it didn't matter. I laboriously climbed down the other side of the rocks and dropped into the boat, which creaked and complained at my presence. I hoped it would wait until I was finished to fall apart.

I untied the frayed rope that fastened the boat to the post. An oar sat on the wooden slats that formed the floor of the boat. I picked it up and started paddling.

The channel was calm and quiet. The water that lightly slapped the canoe was an impenetrable oily black. Whatever moon was out was obscured by the clouds, leaving it darker outside than it had been the night of my previous job. An irrational bout of nervousness came over me as I wondered what was under the water. There were always the usual mirelurks and giant squid, but neither of those attacked boats. There could always be something bigger or more nasty that I'd forgotten about... I looked away from the foaming water and kept paddling.

Another small, single-person boat near the shore caught my eye. I could just make out its shape against the meager light of the city, but I couldn't see well enough to tell who, if anyone, was inside. It looked empty. It must have slipped its mooring and drifted away.

I turned my attention to the ship. As I got closer to the ship, it became apparent just how large it was. I lifted the oar from the water and set it across my lap as I stared. The vessel was a great black monolith, like some gargantuan creature rising from the depths to breach the surface for air. Across the length of it there were tiers of higher decks and structures that formed rigid, angular silhouettes in the sky. Antennae waved in the breeze, pointing to the clouds, and cables and chains ran from place to place about the ship. Streaks of rust ran down the hull, and crustaceans and slowly swaying plants covered cracks and seams where massive sheets of metal were bolted together. What little paint there had been was mostly worn off by now, but I could still make out the Chinese letterforms on the bow.

Its size was probably the only reason it wasn't completely submerged—as it was, the top deck was just above the waterline. I couldn't have guessed its length from end to end. It was longer than many of the buildings in the city were tall, and was tilted to one side so that the back end was only a few feet above the water, whereas the front was a good five yards up.

I slowly made my way to the back of the ship. The metal creaked occasionally in the wind. I nudged myself along the hull, moving away every so often to avoid a sluggish many-limbed starfish or spider-like, skittering crab. The side of the ship was visible for less than a foot beneath the surface before it disappeared into the darkness. I leaned over for a better view, and something on the hull, just on the edge of visibility, moved before sinking away deeper into the water. I quickly sat up straight, and paddled a little more purposefully. What was it that kept everyone who came here from coming back? Because it sure wasn't a damn ghost.

At the back end of the ship was a convenient row of eye bolts, one of which I tied my boat to. I jumped and hauled myself over the edge of the deck. And that was that. I was aboard.

I looked around the place, wondering where to start. I walked over the slanted floor to the side of the ship, looking back toward the peninsula. The city looked nice from here. The lights, probably recently brightened thanks to the new turbine that Leaguer mentioned, lit up the clouds above it. I could see the spaceship, too. Lights shone out in a ring around the middle of the craft. They seemed to be coming from the inside of it. I frowned. Did someone live there?

I turned at a loud, deep groaning behind me. There was nothing there, only the ship shifting. But there was a door into one of the rooms that protruded from the top deck. I tested the handle. To my surprise, it opened easily.

As I pushed it open, all at once, there was a gunshot and a horrible pain in my stomach. The wind was knocked out of me in the impact, and that and the shock of the pain brought me to my knees. I drew my gun as I slid down the doorframe, and as I looked up I came face-to-face with the barrel of a short rifle. I froze.

The gun didn't move. I waited for the person holding it to move forward, or shoot again, or put it away, but it stayed perfectly still. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the room, I realized that there was no one there. The gun was propped up on a table.

I fumbled for the flashlight Bruce had given me before I left (he always seemed to be prepared for these things) and shone it into the room. There was, indeed, no one there. A line ran from the top edge of the door to the rifle. It had been rigged to fire as soon as the door opened. How long had that been there?

I knelt on the floor until I felt my breath start to come back. Slowly I stood, keeping a hand on the door frame to steady myself. I pushed my jacket aside to look at my vest. Running a hand over it, I felt a dent where the bullet had hit. It was going to leave a bruise, but it didn't feel like any bones had been broken. I carefully started forward into the interior of the ship.

The inside was all made of similar metal to that on the outside, and the thin walls did little to nothing to stop the cold from creeping in. It was louder inside than out; reverberations of the wind, creaking of the ancient metal, and water dripping somewhere echoed through the hallways. There was occasionally a place where the ceiling had rusted through to give a view of the sky, but as I went deeper into the ship it grew darker and darker until it was pitch black, and I could see nothing but what I shone my flashlight on.

The rooms were largely undisturbed. Some things had slid out of their original positions thanks to the tilt of the ship, but not all had. In a kitchen area I passed, dirty dishes were stacked in a sink as though they'd just been put there yesterday, though the dust told me otherwise. I wondered what had happened to the crew. Surely they hadn't drowned; the ship wasn't totally sunk, after all.

One room I passed seemed to be an armory, though, curiously, there was no ammo to be found and many of the weapons were disassembled or missing parts. I guessed someone had gotten there before me. I did not see any mini-nuke launchers whatsoever.

When I got to the higher end of the ship I went down a flight of stairs to a lower level, and the sound in the passage changed. The air suddenly seemed closer, and the echoing sounds of water were louder. As I walked down the main hall, I shone my light through the doorways and adjacent corridors that lined it. None of them looked promising. As I looked up at the ceiling, watching water drip from pipes and cracks, the sound of the water changed again, getting louder and closer.

I pointed the flashlight in front of me, and swore. I immediately halted, stopping not a foot away from the end of the floor. A gaping hole spanned the corridor for as far as I could see, having rusted away. Below me, where I would have fallen if I'd stopped a second later, were underwater layers of the ship peeled away with corrosion so that I could see down through several floors before my light's reach ended. The underwater parts of the ship had fared entirely differently than the areas above. Every surface was crusted over with greenish white underwater lichen, coral, and tangled seaweed.

As I leaned forward to look down into the pit, a rusted bit of floor under my toe came loose and fell into the water, floating down into the darkness until it was out of sight. I took a cautious step back, but was blocked by something behind me that hadn't been there before. I quickly turned and brought my light up...into the gaunt, rotting face of a corpse.

I gasped and took an involuntary step back, off the edge of the floor. I reached up to balance myself against the wall, my other arm pinwheeling as I teetered. The corpse, which had been still, suddenly looked angry. It reached forward with both arms and shoved at my chest. I toppled off the floor and fell backwards past one deck, then another.

I flew through the air, and then everything was cold and dark. The sound of the water rushed in my ears. My arm scraped against something sharp, and I hissed, letting loose a stream of bubbles around my face. The flashlight fell from my hand, and I swatted at it. I opened my eyes to find it, only to see it falling down to my feet, then a yard below my feet, then to the next deck. A wave of panic shot through me and more air escaped my lungs. My eyes burned, and I couldn't see anything but blurry shapes in the growing darkness, and I couldn't breathe, and the water was like ice.

Forgetting the flashlight momentarily, I paddled up toward the surface. When I reached the waterline I sucked in air and scrubbed at my eyes. I squinted at the hole above me, and in the dim light coming from the flashlight below I could see the ghoul standing at the edge, looking down at me disinterestedly. He waited for a moment before turning and walking back the way he'd come. 'Haunted' my ass. It was just a fucking shuffler.

"Hey!" I yelled, and coughed as saltwater went down my throat. "You asshole! You can't just..." I listened to his footsteps getting quieter. They quickly blended into the other mysterious ambient noises that drifted through the ship. "Fuck you!" I shouted uselessly.

I shivered, and looked around the eroded room I now swam in. A dark cloud had formed around my arm, and the salt burned the cut. I waved the cloud away so I could see. The water was a ghostly blue-green, lit from below. The flashlight had stopped falling, and seemed to be perched on an outcropping two floors down. Below the flashlight the darkness grew again, and the hole seemed to go down forever. If I didn't get that light, there was no way I'd be able to find my way out of there.

I took several deep breaths, held it, and dove. As I got deeper, it grew brighter, but shadows were cast everywhere and around every corner was blackness. I kept swimming, watching the corners of my vision. Everything was moving, the plants making the light and shadow move across the walls and the strange growths that were everywhere. The mottled texture and color of everything was natural camouflage. Even if it was light I wouldn't be able to see if something was hiding below that sheet of metal, or behind that wall of seaweed, or under that protrusion of coral. The gaping darkness below me made it feel profoundly like I was swimming directly into the mouth of a monstrous sea creature.

Something that felt like hair dragged across my leg, and I kicked it away. I could distantly hear the sound of metal on metal, like a chain hitting the hull somewhere far away, and the ship still groaned and creaked, muffled by the liquid. The flashlight was nearly within reach, balancing on a plate of flooring that had probably fallen from up above. As I passed my arms in front of me one last time, the wake of the movement caused the light to roll off of the platform and begin to drift down again. Everything around me went dark as it tilted down, and I saw that even when it pointed directly downward into the dark, the hole was so deep that I couldn't see the bottom.

In a surge of panic I flung my arm out as hard as I could, and my fingers brushed the handle of the light. It spun slightly, and as it hesitated to fall I made a second desperate attempt. With my left hand, I caught the light between two fingers.

I brought it up to my chest, gripping it with both hands. I kicked, and the water slowly pushed me back up. One floor passed, and I brushed against something as I went by. As I floated above it, the light moved to shine on the object, revealing something long and white. As I moved farther up and it was better lit, the object became a skeletal finger, and then an arm, and then a body—an entire skeleton, mostly devoid of flesh but still wearing clothes that waved gently in the water. I floated up farther, and saw another body, more recent, hanging on a shelf of coral. A group of tiny fish nibbled at its mouth and eyes. I wondered just how many people the ghoul had thrown down there.

Finally, I hit the air. I could hear again. My eyes felt like they would fall out. I rubbed at them in annoyance, cursing that ghoul. I looked up, but he had not returned.

I was in a hall similar to the one above. The path behind me led down farther underwater, to the back of the ship. On my sides were doorways, and in front of me was, presumably, the way to the stairs. However, the hall in front of me was blocked by debris and fallen flooring from above, on top of which had grown a mass of coral and sponges that effectively cut off that side of the hall. I'd have to swim below to reach the stairs.

I tried to judge how far away the staircase would be. I hadn't walked very far down the corridor above before I came to the hole in the floor. I would be able to make it back. I was almost sure.

I gripped the light tightly in one hand. I took a deep breath, and dove.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

The main hallway on the lower deck was blocked off with even more debris than there was above. There was only one door not completely covered. I squeezed through the hole at the top of the door frame, wriggling until I became unstuck from the rough coral that lined it. I quickly cast the light over the expansive room. A good half of the floor had fallen away. There was only one door.

By the time I passed through the door into the next room, the need to breathe was getting painful. Swimming, I noticed, was not my strong suit, and my heavy vest made it even worse. I wasn't able to move as fast as I'd hoped I would.

I paddled across the chamber toward the door that must have led to the hallway, but when I pulled it open I was met with a sheet of rusted metal instead of the hall. I braced myself against the doorframe and shoved at it in vain. It didn't budge.

There were two options now. Turn back and hope I could make it back to where I'd fallen before I passed out, or keep going trying to find a way up.

I swam to the next doorway.

In the new room, there was another closed door leading to the hallway. I hurried toward it, and pulled on the handle. It didn't move. I hissed through my teeth as I pulled harder. Little streams of bubbles floated upward along my cheeks. The thing was rusted shut. It did nothing whatsoever in response to my efforts.

Shit.

Suddenly I remembered the chip implanted in my chest, and Bruce's. If I died down here, he would too. That wasn't even fair. That wasn't what it was meant for.

I swirled around to search the rest of the room. There was another door in the opposite wall, leading farther into the right side of the ship and farther away from where I wanted to be.

As I waved the flashlight around the room, the movement of the tall kelp that dominated the left side caught my eye. I followed it up with the light. There was something on the ceiling above them. On instinct, I pushed away from the door and swam through the plants. Sure enough, there was a hole in the ceiling.

As I kicked through the opening, a startled school of fish darted away from the floor. I could see the surface of the water above me, glowing a little brighter than the water below. I counted down: three seconds before I could breathe...two...one...

I gasped as I came to the surface. The sound echoed in the room, and the flashlight in the water cast wavering lines of light on the walls. It was a smaller room than the ones below. A storage room, maybe. The walls were lined with shelves, and there were boxes scattered throughout the room. I swam over to one particularly large one, which was big enough that I could stand on it and not have to swim for a few moments.

This job was obviously not going according to plan. There was clearly a good reason (or several reasons) why no one had ever come back from here. I didn't want to become one of the people rotting in the lower decks.

On the other hand, I really didn't think I'd be able to live with myself if I left without killing that ghoul.

I stepped off the box and swam to the doorway. The rest of the hallway to the stairs was unobstructed. I could see the stairwell from where I was. It was one of the more lovely sights I'd seen in a while.

I rubbed my eyes as I trudged up the stairs. The saltwater stung like crazy. My eyes seemed a little clouded over somehow, and it was hard to see. It didn't matter. I could see well enough to shoot.

At the top of the stairs I entered the main hallway and took my dripping gun from the holster on my ribs. Just as I was doing this, I tripped over something and crashed ungracefully to the damp floor. My stomach and cut arm throbbed with renewed pain as I landed on both. I turned, still on the ground, to see what I'd tripped on.

It was a foot. A boot, actually. I looked up farther to find the ghoul glaring down at me. With a snarl I raised my gun, only to have it kicked out of my hand and down the hall. It disappeared into a dark room.

I leapt to my feet. The ghoul didn't move. I paused as I waited for him to do something. He just stood there, looking unconcerned. His calmness infuriated me even more. He didn't even have a gun that I could see. Instead, on one hip was a scabbard holding a long, old-looking sword. Who the fuck fought with a sword, anyway? Since he wasn't using it at the moment, I assumed it was just for show. To go with the rest of his outfit, I guess. He was wearing a green military uniform.

A military uniform? No, he couldn't have been here all this time...

Without warning, I jerked forward and slashed at him with my knife. He stepped out of the way, and I leapt forward to strike again. This time he moved to the side while grabbing my thrusting arm and carrying the motion through farther than I'd meant to. I stumbled behind him, then quickly turned back to him, both arms up defensively. But he still hadn't made any move to attack.

I feinted to one side, then came in low on the other, going for a stab below his ribs. He wasn't fooled. He got out of the way before I could reach him, and took hold of my arm. He twisted it, and somehow I was behind him again. This time I swiped behind myself again before I'd even turned around, hoping to catch him off guard. He caught my opposite arm, which was flung out for balance, and pulled himself under it, and was behind me again.

I whipped around to face him. "Stop doing that!" I shouted.

He repeated my words in a strange accent, sneering. It was the first time he'd spoken, and it was strangely loud and harsh in the quiet of the ship. It was unsettling enough that I stopped in surprise for a moment. He cocked his head at me and widened his eyes as if to say, "_Well?_"

_Bet you can't dodge bullets as well as knives, _I thought in reply. I took a small step backwards, toward the room my gun had slid into. The ghoul narrowed his eyes, and as I took another step back he matched the movement with his own step forward. At the same time, he slowly moved his hand to the hilt of the sword and began to pull it out.

I turned and ran down the hall toward the door. His feet pounded behind me and there was a shrill metallic sound as he drew the sword. As I was about to turn into the doorway, the blade came down sharply in front of it, and I had to draw back to avoid it. As I stepped back, the ghoul moved in front of the opening, effectively blocking access to my gun. The saber flashed in the dim light. I wondered if he was as good with the blade as he was at hand-to-hand fighting. I wasn't keen on finding out. I backed away from him. When he started to follow, I turned and ran.

Running with a fake leg, I should probably mention, let alone on an incline, is not as easy as it sounds. I was little better off fleeing than fighting, but I kept going and soon I recognized the room through which I'd entered the ship.

I slammed the door to the interior behind me, staggering unevenly into the damp night air. I heard the door open again, and it suddenly sounded like the ghoul's steps got much faster. It dawned on me that I'd only gotten as far as I had because he let me. He'd been moving at a much more leisurely pace before.

I turned to face him, knowing running was useless. He slowed as I turned, and stood a few feet away. Again, he didn't attack.

"What do you want?" I asked.

He didn't answer. He flicked his wrist, the movement making the sword shift at his side. Then, abruptly, it was swinging toward me. I dodged just far enough to avoid the brunt of the attack, getting only a slash across my jawbone. Before I could react he brought the sword down again, stabbing into my stomach. There was a poke and a small sound as the blade was deflected by my vest. The ghoul looked down in surprise at the spot he'd hit—the vest was hidden by my jacket.

As he paused, I leapt forward with my knife. _If I stay close enough to him, he won't be able to use the sword,_ I reasoned. But, when I moved forward, he sidestepped me, grabbed my wrist and twisted it downward, pushing on my elbow to propel me down, and kicked at the back of my knee to force my leg to bend. I fell to my knees, and then, suddenly, my face was pressed against the cold steel of the deck. I went to roll aside but he was already on top of me. I felt the blade at the back of my neck.

In a panic, I tried to throw him off, reaching behind me to hold his sword hand back. In reply, the blade sliced through the muscles on the left side of my neck. I screamed.

He stopped, holding the sword against the gash. I was still holding onto his wrist, ineffectively. I realized he was yelling something at me. I listened closer to try to decipher it, but it was gibberish. He shook the wrist I held, as if miming shaking me off. Each time he moved the sword twitched painfully against my cut. Though it went against every instinct that was currently roaring through my head, I let go of him.

He stopped shouting. The sword didn't cut any farther into me, but stayed pressed tightly against my skin. I could feel blood oozing down the side of my neck. He hadn't cut through any vital arteries, but he wasn't far off.

He spoke, quietly, but it was nonsense again. When I didn't answer, he nudged me expectantly.

"I don't know what you want," I said cautiously.

He leaned closer to me. "You. Here. What."

I could see him out of the corner of my eye. "What?" I asked.

"_What." _He replied.

"What _what?_" I said, my voice rising a little as I started to get annoyed, but the words quickly dissolved into pained shouts as the sword dug into my neck.

He stopped as another voice entered the conversation; someone to the left had said something I couldn't understand. Someone who sounded familiar. The ghoul and I looked up at the same time. Bruce was standing there with his shotgun leveled at the ghoul.

He said something again, softly. After a moment, the sword lifted away from my neck. The ghoul slowly rose and stepped back. I immediately tried to get up, but stopped at the pang in my neck, clasping my hand over the gash. It hurt too much to move.

Bruce walked over, drawing a stim from somewhere, and injected it into the wound without comment. The cut closed.

"Bruce?" I said.

"Yes?" I could hear the ghoul muttering something now, behind me.

"This contract is turning out to be a bit more difficult than the last one."

"I see."

I wondered what he was doing here, but didn't stop to ask. I got up, watching the ghoul shift from foot to foot as he murmured. He still gripped the sword absently in one hand.

"That guy," I said. "He's speaking Chinese."

"Yes."

"You don't think he's been here this whole time, do you? Since before the war?"

"It's not impossible."

As I stared at the ghoul, he suddenly quieted and turned back to us, his eyes burning with a combination of fury and curiosity. He said something again, directed at Bruce.

"What's he saying?" I asked.

"I don't know."

I frowned at him.

He shrugged apologetically. "I don't speak Chinese. I had an English-Chinese dictionary I used to look at sometimes..."

The ghoul spoke again, louder.

"Have I ever neglected to fulfill a contract once I'd taken it?" I asked Bruce.

"Not to my knowledge." He broke his stare down the sights of his gun to look up at me questioningly.

"Well, there's a first time for everything."

"You're...quitting?"

"Yeah. The ship's falling apart; there's debris and holes everywhere, and that asshole's set up one trap that I triggered and at least a couple more that I avoided. There's nothing worth anything down there that I could see, and I looked just about everywhere above the waterline. Even if it's down there underwater somewhere, and still functional, I'm not going to get it."

"I see," Bruce said again.

The ghoul, enraged at being ignored, threw his arms out in angry gestures and began ranting, pacing back and forth along the deck. Twice I saw him stop to look at something invisible in the middle distance, then continue gesticulating and shouting, as though countering an unasked question. Bruce and I stared at him for a while.

"Just shoot him," I said finally, "and we can go home."

He lowered his head to look down the sights. I waited for him to fire, but he hesitated. The ghoul babbled on, oblivious.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

He looked up at me again. "He could help us."

"Help us what? Get the nuke launcher, you mean?"

He nodded. There was something hopeful about the way he was looking at me. He didn't want to kill the ghoul.

"He's not going to help us, Bruce, and even if he was willing to, and if we could understand each other enough for him to know what we wanted, I don't think he could. Look at him. He's lost it." I was beginning to get impatient. "He almost killed me." I reached over to take the gun from Bruce's hands. He didn't let go.

"But he _didn't._ He _didn't_ kill you."

I paused, my hand on the stock of the gun. That was true. And he didn't have any more guns or bullets, or he'd be using them. The rooms I'd passed that looked like storage areas for ammunition had been nearly empty. Which made sense now. The ghoul suddenly looked a lot more innocuous than he had before. I took my hand off the gun.

"So... what, you want to just ask him where it is?" I asked Bruce, folding my arms.

He shrugged, and now he offered the gun to me. "Will you let me try to talk to him?

I made a conceding gesture, taking the shotgun from him.

The ghoul was half turned away from us, still talking, but quieter than before. He had his hand over his face and was shaking his head.

Bruce said something, and at that the man stopped talking and looked up instantly. Bruce took a few steps closer to him, speaking to him haltingly, pausing before each word. The ghoul watched him like a hawk. His expression was different when he looked at Bruce. Merely disgusted rather than absolutely hateful.

"Don't go any closer," I warned when Bruce was several feet away. "You saw what he did to me." I moved toward them to cover Bruce, and the ghoul's eyes jumped to me. He snarled something in my direction, visibly tightening his grip on the sword.

"I think he wants you to stay back," Bruce said.

"Yeah, I got that." I stopped moving. "Will you at least tell him to put the samurai shit away?"

"Samurai are Japanese, not Chinese."

I sighed. "Just do it."

Bruce pointed to the sword, saying a word I'd heard him repeat several times now. The ghoul scowled, but slowly raised the sword and slid it back into the scabbard at his side.

Bruce talked quietly, usually one or two words at a time. The conversation was painfully slow, and more hand gestures than words. Occasionally the ghoul attempted some English, but he seemed to be even worse at it than Bruce was at Chinese. After a while, Bruce said something that made the ghoul shout in response and move in on him.

"Hey!" I yelled, raising the gun. The ghoul hesitated and bared his teeth at me—probably feeling the same way I'd felt when he pushed me through the floor. One hand tightened around the hilt of his sword.

I strode forward and took Bruce's arm, pulling him away. He was still talking, trying to reassure the ghoul, who seethed but did not make any aggressive movements.

"What the hell did you say?" I asked.

"I told him we were leaving."

"Doesn't he _want_ us to leave?"

"He keeps making allusions to the government and the war...I think he..."

"He thinks we're spies?" I snorted. "The war is over," I said to the ghoul, who glared at me. "Is that why you've been killing everyone? What the fuck is here that we're going to tell anyone about, anyway?"

"Ma'am, we should go. We can come back when I've studied my dictionary more."

I didn't think he was much more likely to cooperate later than now, but it was worth a try. Things seemed to have been going alright before Bruce told him he was going to leave. Maybe if we came back later, without an army or whatever it was that he expected, he'd trust us more.

I handed the gun back to Bruce. "I dropped my gun back there. Watch him while I'm gone, and don't do anything stupid," I said, adding the last part because he was way too eager to try and make friends with the ghoul.

I backed through the door into the ship and was plunged into darkness again. I blinked at the light of my flashlight on the floor. I'd been holding it in my hand this whole time. It'd almost forgotten it was there.

My gun was where I'd left it, just inside the doorway of the room it'd bounced into. It was still dripping.

When I reemerged, neither Bruce nor the ghoul had moved. "Come on," I said, walking down the slope of the deck to the back of the ship. I watched the ghoul over my shoulder. He looked back coldly, but stayed put.

At the back end of the ship, I slid off the edge and into my canoe. There was another boat tied next to mine, and Bruce stepped down into it. When we'd paddled a short way away, I turned to look back at the ship. The ghoul was sitting down on the deck, his head propped on his hands. He looked upset. _Good_, I thought.

"So," I said to Bruce as we paddled back toward the shore. "You followed me here?"

"Yes."

I stopped rowing, because Bruce was already breathing hard and talking at the same time would only make it worse.

I wondered if this was normal slave behavior. I wasn't sure whether I should be angry about it or not. I certainly wasn't inclined to be, seeing as he'd just saved my life. "Do you always do that?"

The seat in his rowboat had broken at some point and been repaired. It still bent under his weight. "No." He drummed the tips of his fingers together over the oar across his knees. "I wasn't sure what effect your memory loss would have on you. I just wanted to make sure... "

"What about last time, at the lake? Were you there, too?"

He nodded.

"I didn't see you."

He stopped drumming and pressed his hands together, but didn't say anything.

He had been quiet because he didn't want me to know he was there, and he didn't want me to know he was there because he thought he wasn't supposed to be there. Not normal behavior, then. It surprised me that he had taken that much initiative. I didn't think he could think for himself that effectively.

"I already asked you to go with me. Why didn't you just come if you wanted to?"

He stared at the end of his boat and said nothing, apparently hoping I'd lose interest.

"That was a question," I added.

"I didn't want you to think that I was usually involved in your contracts. I don't usually help."

He was talking about a reluctance to help me kill people. I could understand that on some level, I guess, but it seemed like an outdated attitude. But even without killing anyone, he'd just gotten me out of that ship alive, which is more than I could have done alone.

"I want you to come with me next time."

He gave me a sort of glazed, resigned look.

"You don't have to kill anyone if you don't want to," I offered. "Just watch my back and make sure I don't do anything stupid. Alright?"

Now he looked confused. "Alright," he agreed cautiously.

I looked away. I was letting him get away with too much, I was pretty sure. What would happen if I kept being this lax with him, I wondered? If I didn't make it clear that I was still the boss, would he stop listening to me? I didn't know why this was so hard, but I wished it wasn't. Maybe I was over-thinking it. Sighing quietly, I picked up my paddle and continued toward the shore, and he followed.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

I'd guess that I had been asleep for a few hours before a rhythmic sound slowly woke me up. Breathing. When I realized I wasn't dreaming, I sat bolt upright. Down the hall, Bruce was on hands and knees on the floor.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He didn't look up. He wheezed, and all the muscles in his body seemed to strain as he struggled to breathe. It sounded painful.

I began to worry. "Hey," I tried again, walking over to him. "Where's your inhaler?" I asked a little more urgently.

He shook his head. "Empty," he croaked, and coughed violently.

I looked around, as though some solution might have spontaneously appeared in the other room. I'd never seen him have an attack this bad. I wondered if he might die. "Should I get a doctor?"

"No," he wheezed hoarsely. "It will...pass."

I knelt down next to him, watching him closely. Who buys a goddamn asthmatic slave, anyway? "You sure?"

He nodded. Admittedly, he looked pained, but not worried. This surprised me. If it was me, I'd be a lot more anxious than that. I was, in fact. "Look, maybe you should sit back?" I suggested, as though I had any idea what I was talking about or whether that would help or just make it worse. But I couldn't just sit there and watch. "Just try to relax, alright?" I said in a way that I hoped was reassuring. I'm not sure it came out that way, particularly. 'Reassuring' isn't really my thing.

I put a hand on his chest and pushed him gently back until he was leaning against the wall. I could feel the rattling in his lungs, and his heart pounding behind them. The feeling was weird. I hadn't expected it for some reason. It was like thinking about a brahmin's heart beating. I guess I knew it was there, I'd just never exactly taken the time to think about Bruce's heart.

He watched me suspiciously. I took my hand away, sitting back on my heels. His shoulders rose and fell tensely with each breath. He closed his eyes.

I stared, fascinated by his calmness. He was compliant enough when he was dealing with me, but no one could call him a coward. Apparently this had happened enough that he'd learned to control it, and it was no longer something that frightened him.

Over the next few minutes he somehow managed to get the attack under control. His breathing slowed and quieted until it was almost normal. He opened his eyes, glancing over when he saw me still sitting in front of him.

"Why did that happen?" I asked, now that he seemed more capable of speaking.

"Attacks are sometimes triggered by...exerting myself too much," he replied haltingly. He took a deep breath. "But also by irritants, like smoke in the air...or by emotional stress, and...frequently by lying down too long."

"Frequently?"

He shrugged tiredly. "Once or twice a week. Less when I have adequate medication."

"We can get adequate medication," I said, a little irritated that he hadn't mentioned earlier that he was out. "Will you take me to the chemist tomorrow?"

"Yes," he said, and I could hear the relief in his voice. "Of course."

So that was how, the next day, I found myself in the industrial area in the south end of the city hiding behind a wall in a half-demolished building, sniping raiders through the window and dodging bullets. We'd come down the viaduct again, avoiding the majority of the raiders, but we had to turn off of it in order to get to our destination, which was in the middle of their territory.

"Why does he live in the middle of a bunch of raider tribes, exactly?" I asked loudly over a rain of bullets hitting the other side of the wall and coming through the window. They didn't worry me. The wall was concrete. They weren't getting through any time soon.

Bruce crouched at the other side of the window. "It's a good defense. It makes it harder to get there, but that applies to people who aren't welcome there—" he winced as something banged against the opposite side of the wall, "—as well as those who are."

"Who wouldn't be welcome there?"

"Come out, chickenshit!" a girl outside shouted.

"Could we talk about this later?" Bruce said as there was another stream of gunfire followed by a scream. Probably someone shot by their own ricocheting bullet. That tended to happen when you shot at concrete walls, unfortunately.

I nodded. There was a break in fire. I peered over the windowsill and shot the raider as he reloaded. He hadn't bothered to duck while he was doing so. Raiders weren't exactly known for being master strategists, though. Or even average strategists.

Bruce crept to the third window away from me. He waited until I went to fire again, then aimed out his window at the same time I did. Several more raiders went down. There were only a few left. As Bruce traded fire with two of them, the third reached into his pocket. I didn't need the scope on my other gun to see that it was a grenade. I muttered a curse under my breath. I went to shoot at him, but ducked back behind the wall when bullets hit the other side of the concrete.

The raider pulled the pin, held it for a moment, then hurled it toward the window. His aim was annoyingly perfect. As the object arced toward me, I stood, and just as it was about to pass through the window I caught it in one hand, sent it flying back to the ground, and ducked again in time to dodge a laser that I swear singed off the hair on the side of my head.

There was a shrill cry, and then the explosion. There was a flash of light and the floor shook. Then it was quiet.

I glanced over at Bruce. He was peeking out his window, scanning the street. I looked out my own. Bodies were everywhere. A couple of burnt corpses remained, circling a splotch of blackened, smoking pavement. Nothing moved.

"We should go before more of them come, ma'am," Bruce said in a low voice. He stood, but didn't put away his gun.

"Couldn't agree more," I said, and followed him down the crumbling stairs. The buildings in this area were in worse repair than those in central downtown. I stepped over a body in the doorway as we exited. One of the other raiders must have accidentally shot him in the back, because he was at too extreme of an angle for Bruce or me to have hit him from our windows.

"Shooting the raiders doesn't bother you?" I asked. The quiet around us rose up in response to the sound of my voice. It never seemed particularly loud where we lived, but there must have been some background noise that I hadn't noticed, because now the silence was very conspicuous.

Bruce looked at me sideways. "Shooting anyone bothers me," he said. His eyes swept the area for enemies as we walked. We turned corners at several intersections, and stopped short when we came upon another group of raiders, sitting around a fire burning in a metal trash can. At a glance, most of them seemed to be either high or asleep, which is probably the only reason they didn't notice us right away. We backed around the building beside us before they could turn and see us. Instead, we walked back a block and went around them.

"I'm not like you," Bruce continued unexpectedly, and I turned to look at him. "I can't just...not care about other people." It was not meant as a rude comment, just a matter-of-fact one.

I shrugged. "It's a violent world. The sooner you get over that mindset, the better off you'll be."

"I've tried," he assured me. "We're here."

"Huh?"

He led me around the next corner and we were suddenly standing in front of a ten foot tall blue monster. I jumped, swearing loudly, and raised my machine gun. Before I could fire, the nightkin grabbed my arm and wrenched me sideways. I reached for my knife, but my other arm was also seized before I could draw it. I was sure he could tear me limb from limb with no problem, and I was just as sure that he was going to do just that before Bruce frantically shouted for him to stop. Surprisingly, the nightkin paused, deigning not to rip me to shreds quite yet.

"Why does your master attack?" he rumbled at Bruce.

"It's not her fault," he said breathlessly. "She's had a head injury. She lost her memory. Of everything. She doesn't know you."

The mutant glared down at me silently, his enormous hands still tight around my arms. He probably didn't even notice how tight he was holding on to me. He didn't look crazed, like I thought all nightkin were supposed to be. He didn't even look angry. After a moment, he apparently decided that Bruce's statement was true, and let go of me. He took the gun from me, and held out his other hand. "Your rifle," he said.

"No fucking way," I protested, still in shock.

"I will return them to you when you leave," he said flatly, his eyes half-closed. "You won't be harmed inside if you make no aggressive actions."

_Inside?_ I suddenly noticed the barbed wire and chain link fence behind the mutant, enclosing a very large space with a wide, short building at the far end of it. There was a locked gate directly in front of us.

"We've been here many times before," Bruce said to me. "There's nothing to worry about. I'm sorry—there aren't usually guards posted outside or I would have warned you. He must be increasing security."

I glanced back up at the strangely calm nightkin. Reluctantly, I took my rifle from my shoulder and placed it across his outstretched palm. "Don't break it," I said.

He made a grunt that might have been laugher or a sound of annoyance, I couldn't tell which. Holding my weapons in one hand, he turned and slid open the heavy gate. Then he stepped to the side and promptly ignored us, scanning the streets instead. He didn't take Bruce's gun, I noticed, which had found its way back to its holster.

We crossed through the gate into the compound. The nightkin shut the gate behind us with a metallic rattle.

I turned to Bruce. "Nightkin?" I whispered.

"They're guards. He makes them medication in exchange for watching the grounds."

"Medication?"

"For mental instability. The stealth boys—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know about that," I interrupted. "I didn't know there was a way to fix it."

"Not fix," Bruce said, "but it does suppress some of the symptoms."

I wondered how many of the things were wandering around. _They,_ Bruce had said. I didn't see any. But then, with nightkin, you usually didn't.

The building looked like it had been a warehouse in the past—all square edges and symmetry and unadorned grey walls. There was an intercom on the wall to the side of the front door. Bruce pushed a button and announced himself. For a minute there was silence, then a mechanical whirring and thump as the deadbolt on the door was drawn back remotely. He tugged open the door. Inside was a long, dark hallway. There were light fixtures along the ceiling, but none of them were on. I had nearly bumped into the nightkin standing beside the intercom on the inside before I realized he was there. He seemed less calm than the one outside. The way he growled as I passed said that he'd be baring his teeth even if he did have lips to cover them.

There were even more of the mutants farther inside the building. One grumbled continuously to himself as we passed him. There was another one that must have been twelve feet tall, but was slouched down and staring lethargically at the ground as he trudged along, practically dragging his fingers on the floor. I was sure his head would have collided with the ceiling if he stood up straight.

After a few turns we came to what felt like about the middle of the building. The hall was gradually brightened by a light emanating from a doorway. One last mutant stood against the wall in front of the opening. He glanced at us as we neared but seemed to recognize us, and remained in place as Bruce turned in through the doorway. A weird, sharp smell, like someone had cleaned too much, emanated from the room.

We entered what looked like a laboratory. It was a wide room with counters lining the walls and long tables in rows through the middle of the space. They weren't all the same height, so whoever put them there had arranged them in the most even possible arrangement—from lowest to highest. The tables and counters alike were covered in decanters and beakers and bottles of every size and shape, filled with liquids or powders or nothing at all. A few papers and notebooks were scattered amongst the other objects. There was a sink in one of the counters and a small stove down the way from it, and standing over it was a ghoul in a pair of stained khaki pants and an equally discolored shirt. Because fate had decided there weren't enough zombies in my life, apparently.

He turned away from the pot on the stove as we came in and looked at us in a rather bored way. "Hello, Bruce. Albuterol?" He asked after a moment, turning down the flame.

"Yes," Bruce replied.

"It's about that time, I guess." He left the stove and brushed past us, going down the hallway. "How are you?" he asked, and he and Bruce launched into a small talk. No one bothered to try to include me. As Bruce followed him and I followed Bruce, I wondered how well we knew him, and if we trusted him. I was really wondering about a couple things, but it would sound strange to ask if they were things I already should have known the answer to. It seemed like it would be a good idea to keep the whole 'amnesia' thing as quiet as possible.

After a time, the conversation died, and the ghoul looked over his shoulder as we walked. He looked me up and down briefly. "What happened to your weapons? The only other time you've been in here without them was the first time you came in."

"The nightkin at the gate took them," I said, not without some bitterness.

The ghoul cocked his head slightly, though he was looking ahead now. "Now why would he do that?"

I hesitated, so Bruce answered for me. "There was a slight altercation."

The ghoul slowed to a stop and looked back then. "Altercation?"

Bruce repeated what he'd told the mutant outside. So much for secrecy. Apparently it wasn't necessary. The ghoul looked me over, as if checking for any changes since the last time he'd seen me. There was an overall air of suspicion about the look.

"It wouldn't have happened if he'd warned me," I said defensively. "I didn't know you had a bunch of pet nightkin."

He turned away and continued down the hall. "Yes, it's all your slave's fault."

I ignored the comment. "So who are you?

"Dr. Dawkins," he said shortly, not giving a first name. "Who are you?"

So I hadn't told him, either. I wondered if there was anyone who knew my name, or if it was lost forever. "I don't know."

"What are you calling yourself now, then?"

"I don't call myself anything."

"Ma'am?" he suggested.

"No."

"Lady?" he went on. "Madame? Woman? Smoothskin?"

"I don't care. What's albuterol?"

"Commonly marketed as Breathe-Easy. Back when things _were_ marketed, that is," he muttered.

"Were you there back then?"

"Mind your own business."

I raised an eyebrow, but didn't really care enough to keep asking. "So what's with all the security?"

We turned into another room. Dawkins opened a drawer and took something out. It was a canister like the one in Bruce's inhaler. "The League and the Regulators both want me gone, and they're a lot less likely to try to make that happen with all the mutants around."

Bruce took the empty canister from his inhaler and traded it to Dawkins for the new one, which the ghoul placed back in another drawer.

"Why would they want you gone?"

"Because I'm the maker of half of the addictive chems in Seattle. The League doesn't like me cutting into their profits in the chem trade, and the Regulators, while they don't usually have time to worry about chem abuse, wouldn't mind eliminating their source. But didn't I tell you to mind your own business?"

"You know, you're an awfully rude little man," I said.

"Yeah, you've said that before."

"I wonder if you'd be so brave if you didn't have all the nightkin around."

"Probably not. But I could still function before they were here. Would you be able to keep doing your contracts without getting caught if you hadn't bought a human shield to hold in front of you?"

I stared at him, speechless. He knew. "That—doesn't even have anything to do with... of course I could function without him," I finally managed, snorting. "He's not a shield." _And it's not like _I_ even bought him,_ I added silently._ He was there when I woke up. I can't be held responsible for things _she_ did before I got here, can I?_

Dawkins stared at me, arms crossed, leaning against the counter. Bruce stood still and silent beside me, as though we weren't talking about him like he wasn't there. He'd put away the inhaler somewhere.

"Thanks for the Breathe-Easy," I said as I turned to leave, not wanting to spend any more time there.

"You're welcome," he replied equally insincerely.

I walked out the door and started down the hall, on the lookout for nightkin. It was a few seconds before I noticed that Bruce wasn't behind me. I paused, then backtracked to the door. When I stuck my head in, he and the ghoul were still speaking in lowered voices. They stopped as soon as I appeared.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Nothing," Bruce said, and quickly moved to follow me.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

I carefully ran my hand over my head, watching my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My hair had grown a little thicker in the past couple weeks, but not over where I'd been shot. I was guessing it never would grow back over the scar tissue there.

The wound was well scabbed over now and looked like it was healing nicely. The black threads of the stitches remained securely sewn into my skin. I leaned close to the dirty mirror and angled my face so I could see the stitches in the steady, yellow light emanating from the bulb on the ceiling. I raised my knife, then spent several seconds trying to situate it so that I could still see. This would be a lot easier, I realized, with a second person, but Bruce was out talking to the mediator.

Eventually, leaning awkwardly on the counter and twisting my head back and to the side, I managed to position the knife above the first thread and slowly saw through it. I winced as the blade sliced through the stitch and bit into my skin. Setting the knife down on the counter, I grasped one end of the thread and pulled slowly, creating an uncomfortable tugging sensation under my skin. It didn't move. I paused, wondering if it wasn't ready to come out yet. I wondered if Bruce would know. He was pretty smart, I thought—more than I'd originally thought he was.

But if I didn't take it out now it would surely get more embedded as my skin healed over it. Resolved, I tugged harder at the thread. With a small pop, it suddenly came unstuck. I was left with a short dirty thread in one hand and a pair of tiny holes in my head.

The rest of the stitches came out with similar results. A drop of blood oozed from one of the leftover holes, but that was it. I wiped my knife on my pants and sheathed it, and poked carefully at my head as I wandered back to the offices.

The windows in the back office faced the building next to us, so there was much nothing to see out the windows. Nothing moved. It was very quiet. It felt like there should be a clock ticking, but we didn't have one.

Bruce's Chinese book was lying on top of a pile of other books against the wall. He'd been reading it a lot lately. I picked it up and flipped it open to one of the pages that was bookmarked with a scrap of paper. There was a column of the Chinese text along the left side of the page, and English on the right. Words and definitions. I shut it, careful not to let any of the markers fall out, and set it back down where it had been.

I heard the door on the first floor close. I thumped down the stairs to meet Bruce, and when I came to a stop in front of him several floors down, he held up a piece of paper with writing on it. Another contract.

Only a few hours later, we were on a ferry crossing the lake.

Our target was on the other side, in a neighborhood called Medina. This job, again, would be different than the previous two. The target was a man who lived in one of the old mansions there. He was some kind of computer geek, according to the contract. It wasn't hard to guess why the League wanted him dead, in that case (assuming they were the ones who supplied the contract). "You're either with us or against us, especially if you have something we want or you could be competition," I said quietly.

There was a small noise behind me. I turned away from the railing to look. A little kid stood there. A girl, I guessed, by the lank blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. She was wearing a strange bird mask with a beak that protruded a foot out in front of her head. It was painted black with green, red, and white patterns. It was a style I recognized; I vaguely remembered it being associated with people who had lived here hundreds of years ago, even before pre-war Americans. I wondered where she'd gotten it.

"Why are you _talking to yourself_?" she said in a snooty sort of voice, muffled by the headgear.

I looked lazily around the boat, since it was the first time in a while that I'd turned away from the water. There were maybe ten other people on this deck. Most were sitting inside. Bruce was off somewhere else, either inside or on the lower deck. It was a dark day, and the sky, the lake, the boat, and the people all seemed to be just different shades of grey.

"I don't know. Why not?" I said finally, looking back down at the girl.

She crossed her arms, the mask tilting precariously as she tried to balance it on her head. I noticed she had a tiny strip of green wrapped around one wrist. "You're stupid," she announced.

I smirked, and turned back to the waves.

Plainly not one to be ignored, the girl walked over and climbed onto the railing beside me. "What's your name?_" _

"You can just call me Stupid," I said.

The unblinking eye of the mask stared at me. "That's not your name?" came the indignant voice from behind it.

"That's okay," I assured her.

"No it's _not._" She paused, as if to make sure I wouldn't argue further. Satisfied, she went on: "Where are you going?"

"Are you always so obnoxious? I'm surprised no one's thrown you overboard yet."

"My dad drives the boat_._"

"Does he?" Leaguers ran damn near everything, didn't they?

"No _duh._ If anyone threw me off, he'd just kick _them _off." She adjusted the mask with a small hand. "I gotta help him sometimes, you know," she said with the slightly exasperated but noble air of one who had done, according to her perception, much hard work in her short lifetime. "With concessions_."_ She reached into a pocket on the inside of her dirty lime green jacket. The sequined dragonfly along the side of it wiggled as she took out a water bottle and showed it to me. "Do you want to buy some filtered water?"

I smiled. "You're an excellent salesman, but no, thank you."

"There's no rads. I'm not lying."

"I don't have any money," I said, which was a lie, but not much of one. We were down to our last few caps. Bruce and I had been living off of radroaches for the past few days. Right now we had just enough to pay for a return trip on the ferry.

The girl sighed, slinging the bottle over her shoulder as though it were an enormous burden, and went to talk to the next closest person: a man who looked down in mild surprise when she approached, then shook his head when he heard her offer. Not to be dissuaded, she jabbed a finger at him in an accusatory way as she spoke, and held the bottle up insistently.

I smiled and looked back at the water. We weren't far from the shore now. I could see what must have been the dock where we'd be pulling in. There was no beach at the shore, only a rocky dropoff and a hillside covered in tangles of dead brush.

I wondered whether this contract would go any better than the last. I glowered down at the water, thinking of that ghoul again. I couldn't believe how spectacularly badly it had gone, especially after the first one went so well. Being unable to take down one person by myself hadn't exactly raised my confidence to soaring heights.

The contract said that the house we were going to was protected by a small army of guards. We'd have to find a way to sneak inside without alerting them to our presence. I was less than positive we'd be successful. Bruce told me not to worry, but even he sounded unsure. Maybe I'd lost my touch along with my memory.

As we were about to dock, I went back inside. People were starting to shuffle toward the exit. I spotted Bruce inside, in a seat facing a row of windows. I went over and stood behind his bench, but he didn't seem to hear me approach. His right hand was pushing back the sleeve on his left so he could scratch his arm. The pale skin of his wrist was lined with even paler scars. He looked down at them and traced the lines with his finger.

"What happened there?" I asked.

He jumped, tugging his sleeve back down to cover them. But before he could answer, there was a boom on the other side of the boat.

All at once there was a cacophony of screaming and shouting, and several more gunshots. There were too many people standing in the doorway, and at first I couldn't see what was happening. There was a lot of movement as people scattered, ducking and dodging out of the way of the attackers on the dock. I ran to the door, drawing my submachine gun. I heard Bruce close behind me.

Somebody in the doorway was shot and fell as I approached, and I could suddenly see through the door. Someone in patched-together leather armor and wild hair was firing randomly into the crowd. Without a thought, I fired back, hoping none of the people in front of me would move into the way and block the shots. As I stepped through the door the raider fell to his knees, then onto his face, bleeding profusely from the holes in his head.

Two more raiders to the right were still standing, and as I killed the first one they realized their new threat and turned to me. I was faster than both of them, and they were down as quick as the first. All at once it was over, and it was quiet.

I lowered the gun, but didn't put it away. The other passengers cowering against the wall next to the doorway looked up at me, and then nervously around the boat. Slowly they began to stand. Everyone, me included, looked to see what the damage was. I could see two people who were clearly dead, and one more who would be soon. A couple more had more minor injuries. Nothing a half-decent doctor wouldn't be able to fix. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, considering I was the only one who didn't just skitter away like a radroach at the first sign of trouble.

The stunned silence was broken with a pained outcry from the deck above, then footsteps pounding down the stairs. A frantic-looking man appeared at the foot of the stairs and I moved aside to let him run through the doorway. At first I thought he was going to run off the ferry, but then he turned to shove his way through a crowd to the right. As they parted, he stopped in front of a body I hadn't seen and fell to his knees. From this angle I could only see shards of painted black wood on one side of him and small, limp feet on the other. A sinking feeling came over me.

As the man agonized over his daughter's body, several of the people around him turned away, unable to watch. Some simply stared in morbid fascination at the scene. The man brought his hands back down to the body and picked it up to cradle the sagging form against him.

At this point I realized that my fists were clenched at my sides. I slowly unfolded them. Why hadn't anyone else done anything? They all ducked away behind their own hands while three people shot up the entire boat. I knew some of them had guns, why didn't they use them?

I turned on my heel and stalked toward the shore. No one had set up a ramp yet, so I just stepped from the edge of the boat to the dock. I started down the planks, then paused and turned back to help Bruce down to the dock. No one came behind us. They were all still taking in the carnage. I strode straight down the dock onto a path leading up the hill in front of the boat. As I ascended, the path grew smaller and smaller and more overgrown until it disappeared. I drew my knife and slashed at the vines and bushes blocking the way.

When we were almost to the top, I suddenly noticed Bruce was calling to me. I stopped, knife in midair. I dropped it to my side and looked over my shoulder. He was some ten yards below me, breathing hard. He pushed the chopped branch of a bush out of the way as he took another step forward, following my path.

"Could we... slow down, for a moment? Please?"

I looked at him, then back at the ferry. Still no one was disembarking, though it looked like they'd finally gotten to work on helping the wounded. I took the few more steps to the crest of the hill and stopped to wait. There was a lot of rustling and the occasional muffled curse behind me. After a time he reached the top and stopped next to me.

"Why do they do that?" I asked, turning to him.

He was carefully extracting a thorned vine from his scarf. He looked up as I spoke.

"Nobody paid them to do that," I said. "And it was obvious suicide."

"It's the chems..." he said with a regretful shrug. He was right, of course. It was a stupid question. They were raiders. They raided. There was no logical thought behind their actions.

I turned my back to him and stared out at the gentle slope in front of us: the expanse of dead trees and bushes and the sparse array of houses dotting the land. I tried to think about something other than that shattered mask.

"Why didn't anyone do anything?" I asked, maybe a little too loudly. "Why was I the only one?"

"It happened very quickly. And they were afraid."

I made a derisive noise.

"It was a good thing you did," Bruce said quietly. "It could have been much worse if you hadn't—"

"It's not like it was some saintly thing to do, I wasn't going to just sit there while a bunch of fucking raiders shot us to death," I cut him off sharply. He went quiet.

After a while I realized my hand was starting to hurt from gripping my knife too hard. I put it away. I took a breath, and tried to let go of some of the tension that had been building up in my arms and shoulders. "Bruce?"

"Yes?"

"When we first met—I mean, after those bounty hunters attacked us—you said my memory would return in a few days."

"I did," he confirmed, sounding thoughtful.

"So... what's the deal? I thought I'd be fixed by now."

"So did I, but that's just what seemed likely. There's no way to tell how long it will really take."

"What if it doesn't come back? What if I'm like this forever?"

He knitted his brow. "What if you're like what forever?"

I supposed he hadn't noticed the way I leapt out of my seat whenever I was waiting for him at 1106 and heard the door open. He didn't know how weird and empty it felt to have no past, no experiences, no attachments to the world around you, or how it felt to feel no comfort or familiarity with anything or anyone. He didn't know how nervous I felt when I was alone. And perhaps he didn't know how unnerved I was at how that girl's death was affecting me.

I shook my head. I doubted he would understand, even if I wanted to explain it to him. "I don't know," I muttered evasively, and redirected the conversation. "Where are we going?"

He looked at me curiously a moment longer, then reached into his pockets. He pulled out his inhaler, then a map. He shook the inhaler and ejected a dose into his mouth with a compressed hiss from the canister. He held his breath, I guess to let the medicine sink in, as he put it back in his pocket and unfolded the ancient map. He came over to show it to me. I realized it was a different one than we'd used before—it was specific to this area.

"We're there," he said, pointing. "We need to be... there." He moved his finger to another point to the northeast. "It's only a few miles away."

I nodded, and looked back at the ferry. There was a flutter of activity on the main deck. The bodies of the raiders had been cleared away, and the only signs that they'd been there were the smears of blood on the floor. Some of the people had left by the dock and were going their own ways. There was still a circle of people around the smallest body.

I looked away, to find Bruce looking up at me, still holding the map out in front of us.

I shook my head and looked away again. "Let's go," I said, and started off to the northwest.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

"What do you see?"

"Be quiet, I'm trying to look," I replied. I squinted through my scope, leaning on the windowsill of the house to steady the gun. I winced when my arm met something sharp—a shard of glass left over from when I'd broken out the window. Evidently I hadn't cleared it all away. I snapped off the errant piece and tried again.

The person we were supposed to kill was someone named Gates. His house was some two hundred yards away, sprawling wide across the ground. It was a huge place, and built so that it was long and thin and bent at several points—not a standard rectangle like all the buildings downtown. I swept the scope slowly from window to window, and across the yard surrounding the house (which was surprisingly well-groomed and even had some grass, each patch walled off with a tiny fence so no one would step on it).

The entire area was crawling with people in various types of armor. They didn't seem particularly vigilant: they all mostly stood in place, but there were enough of them that it wouldn't be easy getting into the estate. I had thought that we'd just be able to take out the guards outside the house and then sneak in, but with so many they would notice right away if one of the others was missing, even if they didn't hear anything.

"There are a lot of them," I said. "It's looking like we're going to have to go around them." I handed the gun to Bruce, and he bent to look through the scope. "What do you think?" I asked.

He paused, as usual, before answering. "There shouldn't be that many guards," he agreed. "I wonder if they were tipped off?"

"What do you mean? By who?"

"It has happened a few times. Once, the Regulators were informed of about your contract and got to the location before you did." He shrugged. "It didn't stop you."

"So how did I get around them?"

He shrugged again. Of course. I wouldn't have bothered to tell him about it. My previous self hadn't made it easy for me to get back on track after I'd lost my memory. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that maybe I'd have to make some changes once my brain was back to normal.

"Come on," I said, shouldering the rifle. "Let's go around the back of the property. There's got to be an opening somewhere."

We climbed down from our lookout point in the second floor of the house and gradually made our way closer to the flat, clear area surrounding the other house. The sun was setting, so we took advantage of the cast shadows of the bare trees and debris of the dead forest, circling around wide to stay hidden. Bruce was surprisingly quiet, now that there were no thorns in his way. Even more than me, probably. It was no wonder I hadn't heard him when he followed me before.

We stopped at the back of the house, crouching behind a fallen log. There were possibly even more guards back here, but maybe that was just my imagination. Either way, coming around this way had done us no good. "Well, no problem—you take those ten guys and I'll take care of the other ten," I said, trying to sound less nervous than I was. Bruce was not fooled.

"There is a way past them," he said quietly.

"You see a way through?"

"No, but I'm confident we will find one."

I stared at him. "Great. That's real helpful, Bruce." We had to find a way through. We couldn't abandon this mission like we had the last one. We needed the money too much.

"We've made it through more difficult situations than this. We can do it again."

"If you say so," I said, scanning the house. I was still doubtful. There were just _so many._ I couldn't see how we'd ever be able to get past all of them. There was simply no way through without one (or probably more) seeing us.

It must have cost a fortune to hire so many. I decided that they probably _had_ heard we were coming. No one would be able to afford to keep so many guards around twenty-four-seven. The guards were all wearing varying amounts and styles of armor, and they all carried different types of weapons. While the closest one to us favored a revolver, the one off to the right carried a laser rifle and a crowbar. I'd assumed that they'd all been hired from one company, but now I thought they must have all been hired individually. If any of them knew each other, they showed no sign of it.

"I think I might have an idea," I said in a hushed voice.

"Yes?"

"What mercenary groups are there around here?" I asked.

"None, as far as I know. Only freelancers like you."

"So that's what they are, huh?" I said, jerking my head toward the guards.

He nodded, raising an eyebrow slightly.

"Well, as a fellow mercenary, I should fit right in, shouldn't I?"

His eyes widened. There was a pause, and I watched as he obviously struggled to reconcile the desire to steer us clear of danger with the fear of saying 'no' to me. I would be lying if I said it wasn't a little funny, but at the same time I felt guilty for thinking so—I knew why that fear was there.

"I don't think we should do that," he finally said.

"You worry too much. Think about it," I protested. "There's got to be thirty of them, most hired within the last day or two. They're not going to notice two more people with guns."

"You're talking about just walking up to the house, in clear view of everyone."

"But that's why it's such a great plan," I explained. "No one would expect that, would they?"

"I don't think we should take such a risk. They'll be on higher alert than usual. They won't let something suspicious go unchecked."

I frowned, looking back at the figures of the people on the lawn, now silhouetted in the twilight. I ducked a little lower as one of them turned his gaze in our direction. "Do you have another idea?" I asked.

"...No," he admitted. "But—"

"Then unless a better opportunity arises, we're doing this. We'll go when they change shifts. No one will notice us coming in with the rest of them."

With the darkness growing, the sun wasn't out to reflect off of Bruce's glasses, and I could easily spot the glare he was shooting me. But he said nothing more, and leaned back against the log in resignation, closing his eyes.

I fixed my eyes on the house. There were no lights on on this side of the building, though I could see one casting light onto the ground on another side. After a time, I caught movement through one of the panes. I focused harder on the window, and could barely make out the shape of a person in the darkened room. I watched the other windows, and realized that there were people standing in a few of them, looking out toward us. Probably riflemen. Probably with scopes or binoculars. I ducked even lower behind our cover.

Soon the sun finally set. It was harder to see the guards, but, I reasoned, it was also harder for them to see us. So I propped myself up with my elbows on the tree while I waited. I had figured they'd change shifts within a few minutes, but they must have already switched to the night shift just before we got there. I prepared for a long wait.

I'd been sitting there for about an hour when Bruce moved beside me. His head had dropped to the side. His eyes were still closed, his tense expression gone.

I nudged him with my foot. "Hey," I said in a loud whisper. He jumped awake.

"Sorry, but really, I don't think you can be trusted to fall asleep. Weird things happen to you when you're not awake. What if you start screaming, or have another asthma attack?"

"I just used my inhaler. I don't think I would have an attack," he said, but he settled himself in a more upright position, blinking sleepily.

In another hour, when I looked over, he was asleep again.

I reached out to shove him, then stopped short. He said he wouldn't have an asthma attack, and if he had another nightmare I'd probably notice him moving before he started making a lot of noise. And if he was that tired, maybe it would be better for him to get some sleep before we tried anything. I lowered my arm.

I watched the house. The mercenary closest to us shifted his weight from foot to foot, arms crossed, staring out into the woods. I stared back at him. He yawned, then turned and paced back toward the house. I groaned quietly. I half considered just charging in with guns blazing. We might end up dead, but at least we'd be doing something.

Finally I turned away from the house and slouched against the tree trunk. I could hear frogs chirping somewhere in the distance. The guards behind me were silent. I closed my eyes.

..._Click-click. _

I snapped awake.

I'd fallen asleep. I stayed still for a moment and looked around. I was lying on the ground. I could feel the tree trunk against my back and something warm against my arm, beyond my head. Bruce. It was still dark and quiet. But above me was a large shape—the source of the sound that woke me up. As I focused, I saw the gun pointing at my face, and the person behind it.

"Give me a reason," he said.

_Shit, shit._

I held still. "This isn't what it looks like," I said quickly. I felt Bruce start to move as he awoke, then stop as he too saw what was happening.

"So what is it?"

"You were waiting for someone, right?" I said, trying not to stare at the barrel in front of me. If he was holding it closer I might have been able to simply hit it out of the way before he got a shot off. But he knew what he was doing. He stood a good few feet away. "We're bounty hunters. We're hunting somebody named Stille. That's who was hired to—"

"I know who Stille is, I'm not an idiot," he said brusquely. "And you're right, that's who we were expecting." He looked between us casually, the gun holding perfectly still as he thought. "So how did _you_ know he was coming?"

"We're professionals," I said with a small smile, letting a little haughtiness into my voice as I sensed the probability of our surviving this confrontation going up. "We have our sources. They prefer to remain anonymous."

A lock of long, stringy hair dropped into his face as he tilted his head in disbelief.

"Hey, if they weren't anonymous, they wouldn't be in business for very long," I said.

"I think _you're_ Stille."

And suddenly I sensed the probability of getting out of here going sharply down again. "Come on," I said. "Do I look like an assassin to you?"

"Yeah."

"Well... I'm not." I felt rather than heard Bruce's sigh beside me.

"I hope not. Stille is supposed to be uncatchable, seven feet tall, and made of shadows. I don't think he even sleeps. At least not when he's on a job."

I gave him a cold stare. "We've been out here a while, okay?" I said flatly. "Are you going to keep insulting me, or are you going to shoot?"

"No..." He took a step back. "Get up. Put your weapons on the ground."

We cautiously stood and did as he said. I considered trying to hide my knife, but in the end I tossed it on the ground with my guns. It turned out to be a good idea—he searched us when we'd finished. I was glad not to look any more suspicious than I already did.

"Go on," he said, pointing to the house. "We're going to see what Gates has to say."

I turned and started toward the house, and Bruce fell into step beside me. _Gates?_ I mouthed.

He nodded once.

Maybe this wasn't a total disaster. We'd wanted to get into the house, and here we were, getting a free pass inside. Now it was just getting out that would be the challenge.

We came out of the forest and onto the lawn, where more of the guards turned at the sound of us walking. Somehow, now that we were in the midst of them, it seemed that there were fewer of them. A woman turned toward us questioningly, looking between Bruce and I and the man behind us.

"Shit," she said to the man, sounding impressed. "I was sure you was just seeing things."

"I'm taking them inside," he replied. "Keep an eye out. There might be more."

"Hey, wait," the woman said as he marched us past her. Her eyes were wide. "You don't really look like... I mean, you're not _really_ Stille, are you?"

He shoved me forward before the woman could answer, and I continued grudgingly toward the house. At the back entrance, he opened the door and held it open as we went inside, then came in behind us. Now we were standing in a small antechamber with walls of rough, dark wood.

"Come on," the man muttered, prodding me in the back again. The touch pained me. If we were alone, I would have turned and pulled the gun away from him. I trusted my vest to block the bullet if he got a shot off. But the people outside would hear it, or he might aim wide and hit Bruce. So I started down the hall, holding back a curse.

"Turn here. Up the stairs."

The steps creaked as we went up. I half expected them to break, but they held. On the second floor we went down another long hallway lined with mostly closed doors. The ones that were open creaked on their hinges and revealed dark and uninhabited rooms. I didn't see any windows. We seemed to be going deeper into the center of the house.

Around the next corner, I suddenly bumped into someone, who gasped and immediately apologized. The person, a pudgy woman, paused suspiciously.

"Anne," said the man behind us sharply.

"Oh!" The woman shuffled quickly aside when she saw him holding the gun on us, but he didn't prod us on yet.

"I need a room with a door that locks from the outside," he said. "With no windows. You understand?"

"Oh!" came the woman's tiny voice in reply. "Okay. Alright. There's something just this way..." She carefully edged past us, her back to the wall, and back the way we'd come.

I gave Bruce a significant look. I'd assumed he'd take us directly to this Gates guy, with an execution to follow shortly. This was sounding like he planned to leave us alone for a time.

We followed the jumpy girl back a few rooms, where she stopped in front of a closed door and took a ring of keys out of her pocket. She unlocked the door, swung it open, then quickly stepped back out of the way.

I went inside before the man could poke me again, and as soon as Bruce followed me in the door was slammed and locked behind us. The man didn't speak to us any further. I pressed my ear to the door. There were a few more words exchanged between the two outside, then they left, one set of light, fluttery footsteps going left, and heavier ones going right.

I let out a breath, looking around our prison. There was elegant velvet and wood furniture all around, some of it draped in white sheets. The walls were the same wood as the rest of the house, as was the floor, which seemed to have been polished before, but it was scuffed and dull now, cracking in some places. There was, of course, no window, and no other doors.

Suddenly my left foot went numb. It tingled and felt compressed, like something was sitting on it. I looked down. There was nothing there. I bent and lifted my pant leg to reassure myself. Just a metal bar. I threw the cloth back down in annoyance and shook my leg and stomped on the floor a few times—what I would have done if my other leg was asleep. It didn't help.

Bruce had wandered to the middle of the room, touching the furniture and scanning the walls and ceiling.

"You were supposed to keep me from doing anything stupid," I said dryly.

He turned to me, dropping his hand from the dusty cloth that lay over the couch next to him. "I tried."

I snorted. "Well, someone finding us wasn't really part of my original plan. I meant letting me fall asleep."

He gave me a short angry look before looking sullenly down at the sheet, picking at a loose thread.

I sighed. "Hey, look...I was joking. You don't need to be so sensitive all the time, okay? Suck it up." I smiled a little.

He crossed his arms and leaned against the couch, watching the floor. I rolled my eyes and turned to the door. I checked the handle, just in case. No luck. I took a step back, took a breath, and brought up my foot with as much force as I could muster into the wood next to the handle.

There was loud thump, and a lot of pain as my foot collided with the solid wood. The vibrations of the impact wound their way up my leg, and I leapt away, swearing under my breath and trying not to put any weight on my hurt foot.

"The hinges are on the inside," Bruce pointed out in a bored tone. "You won't be able to break it in."

I looked up. He was right. "We could take the hinges off," I suggested instead. "I don't suppose you have a screwdriver?"

He shook his head.

I didn't have much of anything else on me. I felt around for something I could use to take out the screws that held the hinges on. I tried my keys, but they were too wide to fit in the slits on the screw heads. I turned to the rest of the room. It was mostly empty, but maybe there was a coin or something that I could use somewhere.

I walked through the center of the room as I searched the floor. Bruce moved out of the way, stepping onto an intricately-woven rug beside the couch. As he moved, the floor creaked loudly. And then, suddenly, there was a crack, and the floor gave way beneath his feet.

The rug fell through the hole with him. As he passed the edge of the broken floor he scrambled for a handhold, but the carpet blocked his access to anything that he could have gotten a stable grip on.

With a rush of adrenaline, I dove for him. I hit the floor with a thud and flung my arm over the edge. I felt my fingers brush the fabric of his jacket, and I immediately clenched my fist tightly. I got a handful of his sleeve, and he jerked to a stop in midair. I clutched at the leg of the couch, struggling to keep myself from falling in after him. He reached up and clamped his other hand around my wrist.

Neither of us fell any further. The rug slipped the rest of the way through the opening and tumbled to the floor below. Bruce swung slightly from my arm. His nails dug into my skin.

"Hey," I said, "I think I found a way out."

Bruce swallowed tightly. I looked below him. The floor was only ten feet or so away.

"I'm going to let go, alright? It's not far."

He looked down, then nodded and, after a moment, let go of my arm. He dropped for a second, then landed as softly as he could. Which was to say, not very. But then, if someone could hear him falling, they would have already heard the floor breaking through a moment before. But surprisingly, I hadn't seen any guards inside, and there had only been a handful of people in the hallways. Servants, maybe. All the mercenaries were stationed outside. Apparently Gates had thought that if he put them all out there he would be able to eliminate any threats before they had a chance to get close to him. He was sort of right, I guess.

I eased myself over the edge and let myself hang from my arms before dropping down to the floor below. My landing was louder than Bruce's, and instantly my left leg was shot through with that tingling pain again. I groaned quietly, clutching at the rod that was my shin to remind myself that there was nothing there, and I shouldn't feel anything. It didn't make the pain go away. It only frustrated me.

"What is it?" Bruce asked quietly.

"Phantom pain. Is that what you called it? I feel it every so often, but it's never been this bad." I stood, kicking a broken floorboard out of the way. "It doesn't matter. We have to get out of here and find Gates before that guard comes back."

"Find Gates?" Bruce said, sounding mildly surprised. "Don't you think we should leave while we still can?"

"No. If we try to leave now we probably wouldn't make it very far out the door, anyway. But if we finish the job, get rid of Anne and that guard, there will be a lot of confusion and no one left to know that we're not supposed to be here." I picked up one of the floorboards. It was no gun, but it was better than nothing. I went to the door and listened for a moment, then cracked it open. The hallway outside was empty. "Come on," I whispered to Bruce. He nodded somberly, picking up a board of his own, and followed me out.

I shut the door behind me to hide the mess inside and tip-toed down the corridor. My left foot always seemed to fall just a bit harder than I wanted it to no matter what I did, but I went as quietly as I could. Bruce was silent behind me.

Honestly, I had no idea where to start looking for Gates. The upper floors seemed to have been better-cared-for, so he probably hung out up there, right? Or maybe he was hiding someplace that would be more unexpected: in the basement or some other remote part of the house.

After a few turns I recognized a hallway we'd taken when we came in. I had just decided to take the stairs at the end of the next turn when someone came around the corner and bumped into me.

"Oh! I'm sorry," she said, then froze. It was that Anne again. She looked up at me, then behind us. This time, there was no one holding a gun on me.

I smiled wolfishly. That woman should really slow down and watch where she was going.

She turned to run the other way, but before she could get anywhere I'd reached out and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her back. "Don't make a sound," I said in her ear, "and I won't kill you."

She held perfectly still as I spoke. Then, abruptly, let out a piercing scream.

I jumped and clamped a hand over her mouth. "Idiot! I said _don't, DON'T _make a sound."

The muffled scream dissolved into theatrical sob, and she wiggled weakly back and forth in what I guess was some kind of attempt to escape—a movement not unlike that of a fish on dry land.

"Stop it," I ordered her. She continued to flop and cry. I held her tighter to try to dampen the noise. "_Be quiet. _Can you hear me?_" _

She bawled loudly behind my hand, shaking her head pathetically. I rolled my eyes, and tried to soften my voice. It still came out through gritted teeth. "Okay, look, we're not going to kill you, alright? You're going to be fine. Just calm down, please?"

Finally, she stopped moving around and sagged against me in defeat, letting her head loll and her legs go completely out from under her. I grunted at the sudden weight pulling against my arms, working to hold her up off the floor. She was still wailing. I looked at Bruce helplessly.

At my pleading look, he approached the woman. She shuddered, but stopped when he placed a hand on her shoulder. He leaned forward and whispered something in her ear. He spoke so quietly that even I couldn't hear what he said, but I could hear the gentle tone he used. I watched them curiously as the girl gradually stopped crying. She nodded slowly in understanding of whatever he'd said as he pulled away from her. I stared at Bruce, mystified.

Warily, I removed my hand from the girl's mouth. She didn't scream. As I looked at her over her shoulder I realized that tears still streamed from her eyes. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes again. At least she was being quiet about it now. "Where's Gates?" I asked her.

"P-please d-don't kill m-me," she sputtered quietly, looking skyward dramatically.

I looked daggers at her, out of her view. Time was running out. The guard was bound to be back to the room where he'd left us soon. When he found us gone, the house would be swarming with the rest of the mercenaries in short order. The idiot time-wasting girl was going to kill us.

I bit back a sharp remark. Whatever magic Bruce had performed on her, I didn't want to undo it. Instead, I took a slow breath. "Where. Is. Gates," I repeated.

She sniffled, and hesitated only a moment before nodding down the corridor to the left. I pulled her to her feet, letting her walk but keeping a hand on her arm, and started quickly down the hall.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

We went up the stairs and through a maze of other rooms and hallways, then up another set of stairs. I could hear other people walking above and below us as we went. Twice, someone on our own floor came toward us and we had to duck into another room while they passed. Servants, both of them, wearing plain clothes. Neither had armor or weapons.

As the sound of their footsteps disappeared, we crept out of our hiding place and hurried along at the woman's directions. It occurred to me that she could very well be leading us in circles, away from our goal, but that thought didn't cause me much worry. She wasn't brave enough. She'd do whatever we wanted her to.

As we ascended into the heights of the house, the rooms got more and more elaborate and well-decorated; none of them as sparse as the one Bruce and I had been stuck inside. We passed rooms full of computers, buzzing with the sound of electricity. One room was completely lined with flickering screens. Some of them were connected to cameras, I realized: they displayed pictures in night-vision of various parts of the yard just outside the house. It was impressive, I had to admit. This was inspired by pre-war tech, but it had obviously been made after the bombs fell.

We were on the top floor, and I heard voices from a room at the far end of the hall. I paused in the walkway at the sound, a few yards away from the door. I glanced inside a room next to us—it was even more awe-inspiring than the rooms below us. The entire room seemed to be made of metal, lined with blinking lights and control panels and whirring computers and screens displaying lines of text. I had no idea what it was for, but it looked important.

So this was what the League was after. Technology like this meant money and power, and they wanted it. It seemed counter-productive. Their purpose, so they said, was to rebuild Seattle to what it had been before the war. Wouldn't somebody who could make stuff like this be able to help do that, even if he wasn't working with the League?

"You don't have to do it," came Bruce's hushed voice, as though he'd been reading my mind. I looked back at him, taking in his solemn, expression. I looked back at the door. I opened my mouth and was about to respond...when the door opened with a creak.

The mercenary who'd taken us inside appeared. He stopped in the doorway when he saw us. His eyes widened briefly. "Shit," he said, and his hand flew to the gun at his side.

I raised the floorboard I still held and hurled it at him as hard as I could. He put his arm up instinctively, and the board slammed into it as he fired the revolver awkwardly with his other hand, hitting the wall next to me. As soon as the board left my hands, I rushed forward and slammed into him, knocking him over and pinning him to the floor. I was distantly aware of the woman behind me screaming and of someone inside the room shouting in a reedy voice.

I worked to keep the man's gun pointed away from me and slowly fought it back toward his own head. Bruce ran past me into the room, and there was another gunshot. I glanced up for a split second to see what had happened, and the man under me took the opportunity to throw his head up and butt me in the mouth. He pushed away from me with all his strength, nearly wresting his hands away from me. But I recovered in a moment, tasting blood. It made me angry. The pain, minor though it may have been, seemed to course through me in a rush of heat and strength, and I shoved the man back down, pushing the gun dangerously close to his temple. He resisted, but I only needed a few more inches, I was winning...

"Bitch," he spat, shaking with the effort he was exerting.

Another name. Stille, Ma'am, Bitch. It worked as well as any other, I suppose. I didn't say this to him. I just pulled the trigger.

His blood poured over the floor as I pulled the gun from his limp fingers, pulling the hammer back. The girl screamed more. I stepped around the gore and into the room. On the floor, in rather the same position I'd just been in, was Bruce. He was holding down the man beneath him, with what appeared to be a good deal of effort. I doubted he would have been able to accomplish such a feat had he and his opponent not been of similar stature. They looked like mirror versions of each other—the man on the ground was pale and skinny and wore glasses. They even looked close to the same age. He had no armor, only the gun. I wondered if he'd ever used one before. He didn't seem like the type.

I stepped forward and carefully set my left foot down on the gun he held. He winced and made short, pained sounds as I crushed his fingers. I reached down and pulled the gun away as he watched me with frightened eyes. I put a hand on Bruce's shoulder to let him know that he could leave. I knew he wanted to be involved in this as little as possible.

As he moved away, I placed my other foot over the man's throat, keeping him still. He choked and pushed at my boot with both hands, to no effect.

"Mr. Gates?" I asked.

He looked at me, eyes wide, and didn't reply. Not that it mattered, it had to be him. He matched the description in the contract, anyway. I moved the gun over his head, and I felt his chest moving up and down as his breathing immediately sped up. His eyes narrowed, but didn't close. He continued to watch me as closely as I watched him. He was not at all what I'd expected. I'd thought he would offer me caps, with as many as he seemed to have. But this: not a word, not even much of a struggle—this was a surprise. The way he looked at me was almost curious. Calm—maybe 'at peace' was the right description. There was fear, but not hate. It was such a strange way to look at someone who was about to kill you. I didn't know what to make of it.

"Ma'am," Bruce said, breaking my reverie. He took a tentative step forward, raising a hand as though to touch me. He probably meant to try to convince me not to shoot, but his voice breaking the silence reminded me that I had a time limit.

"Sorry," I said quietly to Gates, because he didn't seem like such a bad guy. I fired, and the contract was done. Bruce jumped at the sound, and after a moment his hand fell back to his side.

I heard the thumping of footsteps below us. A lot of footsteps. "We need to get out of here." I handed Gates's gun to Bruce and turned to the hallway, stepping over the dead guard again. I spotted a shape huddled at the far end of the hallway, and I realized the girl was still there. I'd forgotten about her. She'd been frozen in place, but quickly rose and began to run as I caught sight of her. I raised the gun again, pulling the hammer back. I aimed a short distance ahead of her, and she ran straight through my sights. I pulled the trigger.

Right as I fired, my arm was shoved roughly aside, making the bullet crash into the wall rather than the woman. I stumbled back as Bruce pushed me into the wall, and for a moment I was too startled to do anything. I stared at him in astonishment. He looked almost as surprised as myself. After a second, I shoved him away furiously. He collided with the opposite wall, and I aimed down the hallway again. But the girl was gone. I roared wordlessly in frustration and started down the hall, but was stopped at the sound of closer footsteps, coming toward us. Too close. I swore and retreated to Gates's room. A spray of bullets dug into the heavy wood as I slammed it shut behind us and locked it.

I turned to Bruce and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, shoving him against the wall. "What is the _matter_ with you? Why would you do that?" I raged. "Are you a complete idiot?"

He stood stiffly against the wall, arms at his sides. "We need to go," he said.

"_It doesn't matter!_" I hissed. "You've killed us both! Do you realize that? She knows who we are! She'll tell the rest of them!" I pulled away from him, raking my fingers over my scalp in despair. "_Fuck._"

Something banged into the door. There was a loud crunch. I looked over, and the wood was broken. A foot kicked through the panels to make the hole bigger.

I glared at Bruce. But he was right. We needed to get out. Even if we were most likely doomed, I'd rather die later than now.

I exited through a side-door and into another room. It was long and skinny, and lined with more computer stuff. I ignored it and ran to another door at the far end of the room. As I opened it, a small crowd already in the hallway took aim and rained down a small deluge of lasers and bullets toward me, and I quickly shut the door again, locking it. I turned back to the room, looking for another way out. There were no windows, but there was one other door.

I yanked at the handle, but it was locked. I glanced at the side of the doorframe. No hinges. I took a step back, drew back my foot, then brought it back up with all my might.

The door flew open, the lock broken, and bounced against the wall. I caught it and held it open, stepping inside.

"It's a closet," Bruce said.

"I can see that," I snapped. It was a _big_ closet, at least, but there were once again no windows, and no doors. I went inside anyway and closed the door behind us.

"Ma'am—"

"Shut up." At the other end of the closet there was a square panel cut in the ceiling. I went over and pushed up on it, moving it up and over to reveal an attic crawl space. Behind us, I could hear shooting and banging on the doors to the other room. I quickly jumped and pulled myself up into the hot, musty air of the attic. The room was enormous—it stretched across almost the entire house. I started quickly but quietly away from the opening.

There was a sound behind me: "Ah—"

I closed my eyes in momentary irritation, and turned back to the hole impatiently. Bruce was way too short to reach the ceiling without a ladder. He looked vaguely embarrassed. In the other room, there was a loud crunch as one of the doors broke.

I could leave him here, I thought. Let him take the fall for me. If nothing else, it would buy me enough time to get out of here.

I could hear shouting in the other room. Bruce looked up at me expressionlessly. Grudgingly, I knelt down and offered him my arm. He immediately took it. "Jump," I said, and as he did, I pulled him up. He swung his knee up over the ledge as someone opened the door to the closet. The guards fired. A volley of bullets hit the wall at the back of the closet. With one last burst of effort I heaved Bruce to his feet and took off running across the attic.

They shot at the ceiling, and occasionally a projectile exploded through it and into our path, but none hit us. We pounded toward the other side of the house, dodging boxes and chests, not bothering with stealth anymore. I heard someone climbing up after us.

When we were halfway across the house, I saw a second hatch in the floor near the far wall. At about the same time, whoever was behind us started shooting. I stopped, ducked, and turned to shoot back. On the second shot, he went down, tumbling backwards through the hole. There was a shout as, I assumed, he hit someone else who'd been coming up. I smirked and continued running.

We slowed as we reached the door, and I heard someone else climbing up at the other end. I motioned for Bruce to stop. We held still, watching the guard. It was dark enough up here that if we stayed still, he might not be able to see us. As soon as we moved, he'd start shooting. The guard scanned the attic floor, sweeping his gun across the space along with his gaze.

I glanced at the door. I had no idea what was beneath it, but we didn't have much choice other than to go through it. "When I tell you, open the door and jump through. I'll cover you," I whispered. He gave a very small nod. Slowly, when the guard's head was turned, I raised my gun. Someone else came up through the door behind the guard. I swore. "Go."

Bruce flung open the door, and the light from the hall below illuminated the attic. I fired twice at the first guard, hitting him once. He went down, and I shot at the next one—only to hear a deeply distressing empty click from my gun. My six shots were up. I threw it aside as Bruce dropped through the door.

The second guard fired back at me, and I tried to make myself as small as possible, holding an arm over my head. The wood on the wall splintered where his bullets hit. I held the hatch open, and as soon as Bruce was out of the way, I leapt through behind him. In the air, when I was nearly below the ceiling again, the guard fired one last shot, and pain exploded in my side. I dropped the rest of the way to the floor, and when I hit, something snapped.

The pain when I landed was the worst I'd ever felt. I groaned involuntarily and crouched there for a moment, unable to move. I reached a hand over to touch the right side of my waist. The bullet cracked my rib when it hit my vest, and when I impacted the ground it broke entirely.

Bruce looked anxiously between me and the ceiling. He came over and put a hand on my arm, as though to help me up. "They're coming."

I shook him off, standing unsteadily. "Do you have any stimpaks?" I gasped.

"No, we're out."

As I'd thought. I painfully jogged down the hall and around the corner. We backtracked around a different hallway, going back to the other side of the house, taking a turn whenever we had the chance. By a stroke of luck, we found a staircase, and followed it down to the floor below. When we had lost ourselves somewhere in the center of the house, I stopped and leaned against the wall, holding my side.

Bruce was breathing hard, but was otherwise in good shape. He pulled out his inhaler and lifted it to his lips. "What happened?" he asked before taking a dose.

"They shot me." I unhooked the velcro on the side of the vest and lifted my shirt to look under it. There was a definite mark there, but no bruising yet, and nothing was sticking out where it shouldn't be. "I think I broke a rib. Maybe more than one."

There were racing footsteps above us. "Fuck," I muttered under my breath. I started toward the next cross section of hallways, then stopped. There were more footsteps coming somewhere to the left, and to the right I could hear someone speaking. These people didn't sound as hurried—they weren't with the group upstairs. They didn't know what was happening or where we were.

"Give me your gun," I said to Bruce, and he handed it over. I raised it and fired into the darkness at the other end of the hallway, then twice more after a second had passed. I turned back to Bruce, who was giving me a bewildered look. "Go back a ways," I said, pointing back down the way we'd come. "Like you're just getting here." He didn't ask any questions—he caught on quickly. He nodded and backed down the corridor. I wondered if he'd run off or do something else equally unhelpful, since he was apparently just doing whatever he wanted now.

At the sound of my shooting, the people to either side of our hall hurried toward us. I limped forward, and got to the intersection at about the same time as the guards. I stopped and turned to them, an arm wrapped around my stomach. "Has anyone got a stim?"

The guards hesitated, keeping their weapons up cautiously. On cue, Bruce run up behind me. "What happened?" he asked in an unusually firm, emotive tone. The confidence and expressiveness of it sounded strange coming from him, but it wouldn't sound unnatural to everyone else. He was a good actor. Even his body language looked different. "Where are they?"

"Did you hit them?" one of the guards asked, taking the bait.

"No," I said, my voice tinged with pain that I didn't have to fake. "But they got me. They went that way." I pointed down the hall, and put on a distressed face. "Gates is dead. Someone go after them before they get away."

The first guard on the left nodded and took off, followed by most of the others. "Do we still get paid if he's dead?" one of them asked as he ran down the hall.

"If you can't find any stims," said another one who had hesitated, watching me with concern, "try and find that girl Anne, she might have some."

"Yeah," I said through my teeth.

"Go on, I'll stay and help her," Bruce said to the man.

"Right. Good luck." The guard hurried after the others, holding his rifle in front of him.

We waited until they'd gone around the next corner. I emptied the rest of the rounds from the gun, then tossed it away. If we ran into anyone else, they might recognize it as Gates's. It wouldn't do to have that kind of evidence on us.

We made our way through the rest of the house as fast as possible, though we mostly had to guess at where we were going, so it took longer than it should have. However, we had successfully lost the people who'd chased us through the attic, and I don't think any of them had seen what we looked like, thanks to the scarce lighting in the house. It came as a surprise when I opened a door and was greeted with a cold gust of night air. I quickly stepped outside and oriented myself. We were on the side of the house, relatively close to where we'd come in. Now none of the guards were present—they'd all moved inside.

At the edge of the trees I found our weapons behind the log where we'd left them. I put away my knife and machine gun and held my rifle at my side, scanning the dead, grey trees, and the shadows they formed on the ground. Where was that woman? Would she stay in the house and tell the guards about us, or was she hysterical enough to run? Was it worth staying to try to find her, or should we just get out of there while we had the chance? I hurt too much to think. My ribs were killing me...

"Ma'am?"

I turned from the trees, pulled away from my thoughts, and saw what had drawn Bruce's attention. There was a commotion to the right, in the direction of the waterfront. I saw the waving of flashlights, and a small band of people racing across the lawn. Someone at the back of the group gave orders. I recognized the outline of cowboy hats on each one of them. I groaned inwardly.

They all ran across the lawn and up to the house, some staying outside to search the perimeter. The one at the back brought up the rear, walking slowly across the yard. I was backing inconspicuously away from all of them when there was suddenly a flashlight in my face. I squinted and averted my eyes. The light moved to Bruce, and I looked back out at the source. Through the spots dotting my vision, I saw the Regulator that had been at the back of the group walking toward us. My legs tensed in preparation to turn and run, but I forced myself to relax. I waved in a gesture of peace, and began walking to meet the Regulator. I pulled my jacket over to cover my knife and submachine gun, remembering that they knew the weapons that "Stille" carried. There wasn't much I could do about the rifle.

"We meet again," came a low, scratchy voice as we neared each other. The chief of Seattle's Regulator branch looked solemn, despite her greeting.

"Yeah," I said blandly. "I decided to look into that bounty."

"I assumed as much." She looked at me closely. After a way-too-long pause, during which I somehow managed not to shift uncomfortably, she said, "I don't have time to ask how you knew Stille would be here or how you got here before us, I just need to know what's going on. Were you inside?"

"I was," I replied. "There were two gunmen, but I lost track of them in the house. They're gone. I couldn't get to them before they finished what they came to do."

If ghouls could go pale, I think she would have. "Gates is... dead?"

I nodded. She looked away, shaking her head. I was quiet.

After a moment, she looked up, weary and angry. "Would you wait here," she said, but it didn't seem to be so much of a request as a command. "I want to get your version of what happened after we check things out."

I nodded again, still silent. The chief turned and followed her compatriots into the house, her long jacket fluttering behind her as she ran.

I went back to our log and sat down on it to wait. Running was tempting, but I wasn't sure it was the best option. If that girl was still in there and told them who we were, we were done for. But we'd look equally guilty if we ran off now.

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. There was a stabbing pain in my side. And then another similar pain in my foot. I muttered a string of very elaborate curses.

"Bruce," I said, "if you're still at all interested in making yourself useful, go find me a stimpak."

He quickly left toward the house without a word, looking grateful for an excuse to get away. Not that I could blame him, because I might have lost it if he'd stayed much longer.

I sat as still as I could (because every time I moved my entire right side felt like it had caught fire) and tried to figure out how to mentally force phantom pain away as I watched the people scurrying around the yard and the forest and inside the house as they tried to locate the killer that was injured and sitting in clear view right in front of them.

The activity slowly died down over the next hour. The Regulators stopped searching the woods and instead gathered in small groups, exchanging information. The lights in the house stopped flipping on and off and I could no longer see people rushing past the windows. Eventually, Bruce emerged from the back door. When he reached me he held out a stimpak wordlessly, then sat down on the tree trunk.

I loosened my vest so I could reach under it. I winced as I ran my fingers over the injured area. I felt my lowest rib, though the pain was dizzying. That one was definitely broken, but it didn't feel far out of place. I moved my hand slowly up to the second rib, and pressed down on it slightly. "Ah!" I gasped involuntarily, and Bruce looked over. Okay, that one was fucked up, too. I didn't think it was broken, but it was at least cracked. I tried the third one up, even more carefully, just barely touching it. Nothing happened. That one was alright.

None of them had really moved out of place. It wasn't ideal, but they'd probably heal correctly if I stimmed them. I stayed as straight as I could, and slid the needle into my side. As I depressed the plunger, I could feel the bones reforming themselves, growing new material to fill the cracks and gaps. It was a nice feeling—the fresh and new replacing the old and broken. I poked at them again, and felt only a little discomfort. They were still weak. I'd have to be careful for the next few weeks while they healed the rest of the way.

The chief reappeared a short while later, looking much less hurried than before. Her guns were holstered.

"Find anything?" I asked, rising to meet her.

"Just a couple of bodies," the ghoul answered matter-of-factly. "They're long gone. We got here too late. Seems that's always the case. You can always go after the person who did it after the fact, but once the damage is done, you can't undo it..." She looked back at me suddenly, and I remembered too late to try and look sympathetic. She smirked. "But why am I telling you that? Bounty hunters aren't in it for philanthropy. It'd be the same for you whether they died or not."

"Sorry. I mostly just know about fighting, so that's what I do. I'll leave keeping law and order to you."

She shrugged. "I know what I do isn't for everyone. Figured that out a long, long time ago."

Some of the other Regulators were leaving the house now, gathering in front of the building. The guards didn't seem to know what to do. Many of them were still inside the house. Some had left the area already. Some were still waiting around, trying to figure out who (if anyone) would pay them now and if it was worth staying to find out.

"Come with us," the chief said, motioning for me to come as she turned toward the waterfront. "The ferry isn't running at this hour, but we can give you a ride back to the city." She walked off, obviously expecting me to follow. We really didn't have any other way to get back home, so I did.

It turned out that they had an electric motorboat waiting at the shore. We piled in after eight other Regulators, and someone at the back of the boat started up the motor and steered us away from the shore. The sides of the boat were lined with seats that faced each other, so I was forced to look at the Regulators across from me—one of which, not coincidentally, was the chief. I glanced around at the others, who were sitting around on the cramped boat with varying degrees of attentiveness. Several watched Bruce and I suspiciously. Most of them stared gloomily out at the lake. No one really talked.

Except her, of course. "So, was it you who killed Gates?"

I nearly choked on the very air I was breathing. "Uh...what?" was all I managed to get out.

"Was it you?" the ghoul repeated simply.

I was on a boat in the middle of the lake with a bunch of Regulators. It suddenly occurred to me how stupid I'd been to come with them. I wondered whether I should just jump ship and try to escape in the darkness.

The Regulators all watched me, waiting for my answer. I swallowed. "Yeah, you caught me."

The chief smiled crookedly at the sarcasm. "One of the mercs gave us a description of you," she said by way of explanation. "She said one of the others was bringing you up to the house. You know what that's about?"

"Ah," I said, nodding in understanding. The guard outside who'd spoken to us. I'd forgotten about her. "We _did_ have an issue with the mercs," I admitted, and I proceeded to give her essentially the same story I'd given the guy who found us outside the house. I told her everything that had happened, making up a good deal of it but not so much that it would be likely to conflict with stories they'd gotten from the guards. With so many mercs in there, there had been enough confusion that there were probably already many conflicting stories. I tried not to trip over my words in nervousness. "It was just a very inconvenient misunderstanding," I finished. "We were hiding out at the edge of the yard and we were spotted and mistaken for her. It was a logical conclusion for the guard to come to."

" 'Her' ?" the chief said sharply. "What makes you think it's a woman?"

I froze, and felt like punching myself. Again. "Uh...I just...thought it might be..."

"Well did you get a good look at them or not?" said one of the other Regulators impatiently, the one sitting next to the chief. He was one of the suspicious ones. His eyes hadn't left Bruce or me since we'd gotten on the boat.

"No," I replied, regaining my composure. I ignored the cold stare he was giving me. "I wish I had. A lot of the house was pretty dark. I heard a woman's voice." I shrugged. "That's what it sounded like, at least."

"Could have been the other one," the Regulator said.

I raised my hands in a 'who knows?' gesture.

"Did you see anything else?" the chief asked. "Anything we can use to identify them? Height, weight, hair, skin, clothing...?"

I paused, as though trying to remember. "Nothing that stood out. They were close to the same height, maybe around five-nine. One was a few inches shorter than the other. And one of them had a sniper rifle."

She looked at me for a few more seconds, her expression blank, but something intense lurked behind her eyes. I stared back.

Finally she sat back in her seat, looking away. It was quiet again for a while. I wondered why the interrogation had stopped. For that matter, I wondered why none of the others spoke, even amongst themselves. The disappointment in the air was palpable. They didn't take it this hard every time they failed, surely?

"Did you know him?" I asked the chief.

"Yeah. We did. He was a good guy."

It was quiet again for a moment. There was only the sound of the motor running and "I wish I could have saved him," I said.

"You and me both." She turned to me. "You know who had the hit out on him?"

I shook my head, though of course I did know.

"It was the Leaguers. Just like all the rest of the hits. The real problem isn't Stille, it's them. Their need to control everything and everyone is going to kill this city."

"Why do you let them?" I asked. "Why don't you do anything about it?"

"You make it sound like no big deal," she snorted. "Believe me, I'd love to. But do you know how many of them there are? Do you know how many of _us_ there are?"

"Not a lot?"

"No."

"So you're doing nothing about them."

She paused, looking me over in an evaluating way. "Not nothing," she said cryptically. "But some strategy is involved here, and it takes time. It would hardly be a good idea to just storm the castle when we're at such a disadvantage."

I wondered at what she meant by that. The Regulators were planning an attack on the League? But I didn't ask. She wouldn't have told me.

"Don't you talk?" she said, and I realized she'd turned to Bruce.

"No," he answered.

The chief laughed. "At least you have a sense of humor." When he didn't reply, she looked at me again. "What's his deal?"

"Hired help. He mostly keeps to himself."

"I see."

By this time, we were approaching the opposite shore. We entered an old marina with a surprising number of other small boats sitting in it. The Regulator who drove our own boat slowed and pulled up next to a dock that was meant for a boat that was quite a bit taller than ours. Everyone climbed awkwardly up to the pier, Bruce and the chief and I at the back of the group. I caught more than one of the Regulators looking back at us a little longer than was strictly necessary.

"We're not suspects, are we?" I confirmed carefully.

"Of course you are. But so are a lot of other people," the chief said.

I frowned, and she smiled archly. "Think of it as extra incentive to catch them next time," she said, and with that tipped her hat like she had last time I'd seen her. I stared in confusion at her back as she turned and followed the others.

I waited until they were fading into the darkness away from the docks, then slowly started across the pier. I walked in the opposite direction that the Regulators had gone—roughly where I thought 1106 was. Neither Bruce nor I talked. Instead, I listened, waiting for a tell-tale footstep or sneeze or accidental kick of a pebble that would alert me to the presence of a Regulator tailing us. But I heard nothing. There was only us. I didn't look back to make sure except when the movement would be completely natural and inconspicuous.

I did glance around once before slipping my key into the lock at 1106. There was no one else around. The streetlight above us buzzed quietly. The sun was beginning to brighten the horizon to a light-purplish shade. I stepped inside the building, moving aside as Bruce followed me in, and locked the door behind us. I paused there for a moment. I slowly leaned forward until my head hit the door, and I closed my eyes.

I killed Gates. The contract was done. We wouldn't have to eat roaches for a while. So far, we were still alive, and the Regulators didn't know that we were the ones who'd done it.

But for reasons I didn't really understand, I'd kinda liked that Gates guy. I also made an unbelievably stupid mistake by falling asleep and getting caught at the house. I'd gotten shot. The chief dropped that bombshell, _of course you're a suspect_, after I'd thought I was in good with her. And Bruce let that stupid girl get away.

I heard his feet scrape across the floor as he shifted toward the stairs. I abruptly turned away from the door to grab his arm. He stopped, looking up at me blankly. I glared at him, the anger that had been simmering over the past few hours finally coming to the surface again. "Why?" I prompted.

"It was an impulse. I didn't think," he said, and added quietly, "I told you I didn't want to go."

"I already knew you weren't thinking," I fumed. "What I wanted to know was why you suddenly think you get to fuck up my aim whenever you get the urge, and what was so damn special about her that you're willing to risk our lives for."

"Nothing was special!" he said back, his voice suddenly raised. "She was just a bystander, and she didn't deserve to be shot!"

Before he could continue, and before I'd really thought about it, I'd raised my hand and slapped him, hard. His head snapped to the side, and he stopped talking. He kept his eyes on the ground. I watched as his face changed from anger back to his usual calm expressionlessness. After a moment, he looked back up at me.

"You can do that all you want," he said in a low voice, "but it will never make you right."

"Will it get you to do what I say?"

The set of his shoulders fell a little. He didn't reply. His glasses had become crooked when I hit him, so he reached up to push them back up his nose. Before he could, I snatched them away and threw them across the room. Even before they'd left my hands, I regretted it. They hit the wall with a small, high tinkling before falling to the ground.

Bruce stared at the place where they'd hit, then gaped at me. "You—" He cut himself off, at a loss for what to say or do, before shouting in wordless frustration.

Feeling a bit sick, but far too angry with him to let him see it, I turned on my heel and stomped up the stairs. I realized, as I went into the first office, that there was a door to it that I'd never seen, propped open against the inside wall. I'd never really needed or wanted to use it before, but now I closed it behind me, resolving to sleep in here instead of the hallway like I usually did. I couldn't stand to be around him any longer. Whether it was because I was angry at him or at myself, I couldn't quite tell.


	13. Chapter 13

_And now we've reached the part of the story where the writer creeps out into the light to beg for feedback. Tell me what I'm doing well, and what I can improve. I want to get better. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, written me, favorited, and read so far. You're all awesome. Yes, even you in the back. _

* * *

**Chapter 13**

The sun had just begun rising as I'd fallen asleep. When I woke up again, it was high in the sky and not visible through any of the windows. A solid few hours had gone by. I sat up and looked out the window. The only thing I could see was the space ship. It hadn't moved.

The events of the previous night didn't suddenly hit me or anything—it was the first thing I thought of as I woke up. I'd probably been dreaming about it. I rubbed my eyes exhaustedly. There was no point in putting off dealing with it, I supposed. But god, what a mess everything was...

I got up and walked down the short hall and into the next office. Bruce was already awake, sitting up against a wall, the one with all the books stacked next to it. He couldn't read them now, I supposed. His Chinese book sat next to him, unopened. He was just staring into space. When I entered, he looked up, and my eyes widened. There was an oblong purple mark across his right cheekbone. I didn't think I'd hit him that hard.

"Do you need something?" he asked after a moment. No trace of the rebellion that had been there last night. He looked tired. I wondered if he'd gotten any sleep.

We both knew what had happened. Him pushing me last night had changed everything. Maybe he'd done something similar before I could remember, but since I'd awoken on that hill in the Cascades he had done nothing so disobedient, or so dangerous. Whether it was just a foolish one-time impulse or not, it told me that he was willing to throw away not only my life, but his own, for his ideals. If he didn't fear death, then the threat of the implants we had was useless, and I had no control over him.

Would he take it further? Would he decide that he felt so strongly about stopping me from continuing in my line of work that he'd turn me in to the Regulators? Maybe he would just try to kill me? It wouldn't be hard for him to shoot me in the back if I wasn't expecting it. I could keep trying to get on his good side, but I couldn't stop doing contracts. I had to eat, after all, and so did he.

Again, I was confronted with the idea that he was more trouble than he was worth to keep around. I could sell him, if there was a way to get his implant out. But that would leave me in the same position I was in now, if not a worse one.

I could also just kill him. But getting rid of him at all posed problems that I'd acknowledged several times over by this point.

But maybe he'd also realized this possibility. It would explain his change in demeanor. He seemed eager to please. Or maybe that was an act.

I exhaled heavily, frowning. "No," I finally answered. "You've done plenty."

That girl, Anne, was still out there somewhere, too, as far as I knew. She could go to the Regulators or bounty hunters any time. She was a time bomb. But what could I do about it? How would we possibly be able to find her before she got to them?

"She's going to tell someone," I said.

"She might not," Bruce countered lamely.

"Don't be an idiot."

"Ma'am... I think that you still don't yet realize who you really are to the rest of Seattle."

"What are you talking about?"

"Did you hear what that mercenary at the house said about you? Stille is a legendary figure. I have heard parents threaten their children with you when they refuse to behave. Your abilities are almost always exaggerated when anyone speaks of you. Those who think highest of you believe you to be a demon of some sort."

"People kill each other all the time," I said. "Why is it so special when I do it?"

"Because you do it so often, and so well. No other one person has accomplished as much as you have in that respect."

My frown deepened. Whoever he was talking about, it wasn't me. Not anymore, at least. I didn't have to ask him to know that I'd been much better at what I do before I got shot. I was willing to bet that nothing like what happened last night had happened before then. Something was different now. Maybe that bullet had done more damage than I'd thought.

"That woman was very frightened," he continued. "Many people would refrain from going to the Regulators for fear of retaliation from you or someone on your side. Of all people, she certainly would."

I considered. That was possible. She _had_ been pretty hysterical. But Bruce could also be exaggerating the fear people had of Stille. It was hard to believe that anyone would be so superstitious or gullible as to think that I could come back from the dead, or somehow miraculously escape a city full of Regulators and bounty hunters in order to come after whoever had tipped them off. But then, if anyone would be stupid enough to believe any of that, it would probably be her.

We could leave the city now, but that would, again, make us look guilty to the chief and the others, which would be a waste if the girl didn't tell anyone and there was no need to leave anyway. It also seemed likely that they'd be able to find us even if we ran: with Bruce's asthma and my leg, we were forced to move fairly slowly. It might even be easier tracking someone who was alone in a wide-open empty space than someone who was in the middle of a major city with thousands of other people around.

I would have to wait and see how things played out, both with Bruce and the Regulators. If it came down to it I could change my plan of action, but right now I was rather stuck until another party acted.

The first thing we needed now was food. But that brought me back to my first problem—I didn't really trust Bruce enough to send him out to get our money, but he was the only one who knew where to meet the mediator. But it wasn't as though he couldn't just leave if I left him here alone...what was I going to do, chain him to a desk? It didn't matter where he went, I supposed. He would do what he wanted.

"On second thought, I want you to go get our money from the mediator, and see if there are any more contracts," I said, before I could change my mind.

He gestured to the metal desk at the back of the room. A full sack sat atop it. "I've already gone. There were no contracts."

I went over to the bag and opened it. It was bulging with caps. "How much?"

"Fifteen-hundred." He got to his feet behind me, and I turned to look back at him. He fingered the edge of his scarf, then, apparently realizing he was doing it, clasped his hands tightly in front of him instead. "You... I..." he started hesitantly. I watched him closely, waiting.

"Last night was...utter foolishness," he said. "I was not thinking. I will not do something like that again, I swear. I am not suicidal." He swallowed. "You...did me a great kindness in not disposing of me on the spot." _And I hope you won't decide to do so belatedly,_ the statement implied loudly.

I stared at him as he stood there trying not to look tense. He was trying to make me feel guilty, I was sure. He was doing this to me on purpose.

In any case, he seemed to have come to his senses. Maybe I had been worrying for nothing. I didn't know how to reply, so I pretended he hadn't said anything.

I picked up the caps. "I'm going shopping. I'll be back later."

It didn't take long to get food, but the glasses were another story entirely. I needed to get Bruce new ones. I didn't know which kind to get, so I just bought all the ones I could find. By the time I was finished I had an entire plastic grocery bag full of them. I got a few strange glances. I ignored them.

I saw a few Regulators, but none of them pounced on me. I even recognized one of them from the previous night, but she walked by without looking at me.

Back at 1106, I found Bruce looking out the window of his office. He looked strange without his glasses. I could see his face, for once. I hadn't been missing much before, it turned out. He looked as bland and as vaguely unhappy as ever. Was that because of me, or had he been like that before I bought him? Was that what being a slave did to you?

"What were your other owners like?" I asked. He turned.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you like them?"

He frowned thoughtfully. He looked like he didn't want to talk about this, but he answered anyway. "I suppose."

"Why?"

He thought for even longer before answering this question. "There was no reason for me to dislike them."

"And how did they feel about you?"

"The same, I guess."

"What kind of work did you do for them?"

He shrugged. "When I was young I was too small to do much more than things like cleaning. My second owners lived outside the city, near the mountains where you were shot. When they bought me I helped hunt, repair the house, take care of the kids..."

"Kids? It was a family?"

"Later, yes."

"So how come they sold you?"

"The kids," he said. "They had more of them. And they couldn't afford to house both me and them."

"What about your first?"

"My first owner was the one whose service I was born into." He shook his head. "Why are you asking me this?"

"I was just curious," I said with a one-shouldered shrug. He didn't reply, so after a moment, I set the bag of glasses on the floor in front of him. "I got these for you." I swallowed hard, trying not to look ashamed.

He looked down at them, but didn't seem to be able to see clearly enough to know what it was. He bent down and reached into the bag, then pulled out a pair. Realizing what they were, he put them on and looked at me through the dirty glass. They were too big, with bright red frames. Probably for a woman. He took them off.

"You bought these?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yeah," I added, in case he couldn't see.

He looked down at them, pondering. "You didn't need to get so many."

"I didn't know which ones to get. We can sell the ones that don't work."

"...Thank you."

I went to put the food away.

For the next week, a whole lot of nothing happened. We went back to Pike Place after a few days to restock. As we walked through the halls of the market and on the streets above, I nearly jumped at every sound that was above the level of the murmuring of the crowd. I don't know what I was expecting. I was glad Bruce wasn't with me. I kept imaging him turning me in whenever I went by a Regulator.

I tried to talk to Bruce a few times—there was absolutely nothing else to do when we were just waiting for a contract to come in. He responded politely but extremely briefly. It was disappointing, but not unexpected. I'd thought he'd been warming up to me a little bit before the last contract, but all the progress we'd made was out the window now. After a while I left him alone, though he didn't seem to have anything to do either. He read, when he found a pair of glasses he liked. But even he couldn't do that all day long. Occasionally he'd pick one up, look at it blankly for a while, then put it back. Sitting around doing nothing for so long left me with a lot of nervous energy. I resorted to running up and down the stairs (which made me trip a lot, but I did it anyway) to exert energy and relieve boredom.

Bruce went back to the mediator to check for contracts periodically. The first couple times, he came back empty-handed, but the third time he returned, he was clutching a folded paper in one hand when he stopped at the top of the stairs.

I'd been lying on my back in my office. I watched him, upside-down, as he climbed the stairs and stopped in front of my doorway. I flipped over and climbed to my feet. "What do you have?"

He unfolded the paper and held it up to show me. To my surprise, it was only a few lines long. The other ones we'd gotten had taken up almost the whole page. "It's not a contract," he said. He looked troubled, which made me doubly so. "It's a request from Anton. He wants you to come see him."

It took me a moment to place the name. "The guy who runs the League?"

He nodded, and squinted at the paper, holding it up to the light.

"Does it say what he wants?"

"No. All it said was for you to meet with him as soon as you get this."

"Has anything like this ever happened before? Have I met him?"

"Never."

I watched the paper in his hand, as though it might yet hold some clue as to its meaning. "What do you think I should do?"

"Well—I mean—you have to go," he stuttered, looking slightly panicked at the idea that I might not. "He's one of the most powerful people on the West Coast, you can't just not go if he asks you to."

I didn't like the thought of exposing myself like this. But he of all people would not be someone to turn me in. Still, this whole thing seemed strange. He'd never wanted to talk to me in person before. Why now?

And, it suddenly occurred to me, there was no guarantee that Bruce wasn't making this up. But that was the risk I took when I depended on him to relay information to me.

"Where am I supposed to go?" I asked.

"League headquarters," Bruce said. When I gave him a blank look, he nodded out the window. I followed his gaze. There weren't any buildings I could see from here. The only thing in view was...

"The spaceship?" I said in surprise.

For a long few seconds, Bruce looked at me in quiet puzzlement. He looked back out the window. After a moment, his mouth twitched. He made a strange sound, but quickly covered his mouth and cut it off.

He'd laughed, I realized. And somehow he'd managed to do so without ever smiling. That was a good trick.

He moved his hand away, dead serious again. "It's...not a spaceship. It's called the space needle. It's just a building."

"What the hell kind of weird building is that?"

He shrugged. "It was for the World's Fair..."

I shook my head. "So, when am I supposed to go?"

"It says 'as soon as possible'..."

I looked out the window at the...space needle again. It looked, paradoxically, as ominous and as ridiculous as ever.

"Well," I said, "there's no time like the present." I went to get my gun, then started for the stairs. When I was at the next landing, Bruce was still waiting at the top of the stairs above me, staring at the paper. "Come on," I coaxed, "you're coming, too. I don't know how to get there, anyway."

"It's not far," he assured me, but followed nevertheless.

I paused in the greyish daylight as I opened the door. No Regulators. No angry mobs. I gestured for Bruce to lead the way.

The space needle was only six blocks or so away from where we lived. I hadn't realized how close it was until we turned a corner around a tall building and suddenly there it was, looming above us. I paused to look up at it, squinting in the glare of the bright white clouds behind it. It looked much bigger from here. The flying saucer part on top towered crookedly over us on gently curving white stilts that didn't look as though they should be strong enough to hold it up. Now that I looked closer, I could see that one of the stilts was bent inward in one place, which was why the upper half of the structure was tilting slightly. From this close distance, I could see that there was a column going up through the center of the structure, from bottom to top. An elevator car rested at the bottom of the column. A chain link fence surrounded the entire area.

I faltered when I lowered my gaze back to the ground and saw how many people with guns were standing at the base of the building. Too many, in short. About a quarter wore slave collars. All of them wore green armbands.

As we approached, one of the collared ones approached us, stepping into our path. "Can I help you?" By his tone, it was clear he wasn't incredibly interested in helping.

"We're here to see Anton," I told him.

"What's your name?"

Before I could decide what to say, Bruce produced the contract—the note, rather—and handed it to the other slave. He glanced over it in a bored way, then gave it back and motioned for us to follow him.

"Weapons go there," he said, pointing to the ground next to the chain link fence as we passed it. "Jackets as well. If you do anything threatening you'll be shot on the spot, so don't try it." He waited for us to comply before moving further. Grudgingly, I deposited my knife and submachine gun next to Bruce's shotgun on the patchy grass. The League slave led us around one of the stilts and under the building, to the elevator. As he opened the doors for us, two other Leaguers nearby moved to enter the lift with us. You could never have too much security, I guess.

I jumped as the elevator lurched, then sped upward much faster than I'd thought it would. I hadn't been in an elevator recently, but they didn't usually work this well, I was sure. The Leaguers must have been used to riding it. They didn't react to the sudden acceleration.

I watched through the windows as we climbed higher and higher, until we were passing the tops of nearby buildings. For a moment, I could see the upper levels of 1106. Then it disappeared as the windows were obscured by what must have been the base of the thing that wasn't a flying saucer. The elevator slowed, and came to a stop. The doors opened again, and we were inside a room that curved around on either side of us. The windows that lined the outer edge of the room, though dirty, provided an excellent view of the city.

"This way," one of the Leaguers said, turning to the right. We followed him up a series of short sets of stairs that climbed to progressively higher levels as we circled around the disc. Watching the windows as we went, I could see the cranes on the edge of the waterfront, the island across the water, the Chinese ship in the bay, and the lake we'd crossed to get to our target the other day. The rooms were mostly empty, but were littered with rows of square tables and chairs, like there had been a restaurant there sometime before the war. We passed several doors along the inside wall, but they looked like they hadn't been opened in a very long time.

On an upper floor, we reached a door. The collared Leaguer glanced over us suspiciously one last time before reaching down and turning the handle. The door swung open.

Somehow, what was inside was less impressive than I'd thought it would be. The room was a bit smaller than the ones we'd walked through to get there. Though thoroughly clean, it was largely devoid of ornamentation and furnishing. There was a bookshelf, a desk, and a chair, and that was it. Then there was the man standing behind the desk. He'd been looking out the windows, but he turned as we came in and looked straight at me. I stopped. The gaze pinned me to the spot.

After a moment, he raised an eyebrow in bemusement. "Come in."

I took a few more steps inside the room, followed by Bruce and the two other Leaguers.

"Who is this?" he asked the other Leaguers when they didn't introduce me. They looked to me.

"I'm...Stille."

He waved away our escorts. They exchanged glances, but left without comment. As they left, he turned to Bruce.

"This is Bruce," I said. "He's—"

"I'd hoped to speak with you alone," Anton said. "I'm sure your slave could manage himself without you for a few minutes, couldn't he?"

I felt a brief pang of annoyance. Why was it that everyone else seemed to know so much about me when I hardly knew anything about myself?

I got the impression that he wasn't really giving me an option. I reluctantly nodded to Bruce. He nodded back in understanding, looking furtively over the man in front of me before quietly leaving. The door clicked shut behind him. Then it was just me and the leader of the League.

He was not really an imposing man. His clothes, like the room, were clean but plain. He was a bit on the short side, and of an average build. He had shaved his head. Through the stubble I could see a receding hairline. His eyes, though—I was sure those sharp blue eyes could take in the whole world from wherever he stood, whether he was at the top of this tower or on the street below.

"It's good to meet you," he said.

"Yeah," I replied. I stood stiffly, my arms crossed over my chest as my eyes roved around the room.

"Don't look so uncomfortable."

I slowly unfolded my arms. "I'm sure you can understand why I am."

"You've got nothing to worry about," he said. "Believe me, it would benefit me to keep you around and far away from the Regulators, and you are currently surrounded by people who strongly desire to do what would benefit me. You're safer here than anywhere else in the city."

"Fair enough. But I'm still wondering why you needed to see me in person."

"Yes, I'll get to that," he said, finally taking his gaze off of me. He turned to pace the room. "Let me ask you something, first: do you understand what the League is?"

"A haven for those who enjoy fashionable Emerald City-themed accessories?"

His face showed no trace of humor. "That was a serious question."

Normally I would have already tired of this conversation, but I was interested in where this was going. Maybe I'd learn something. I paused as I considered my answer. "I try to stay out of politics. The inner workings of the factions in this city aren't really my concern."

"Perhaps that is what you'd prefer. But like it or not, you are intimately involved in the politics of Seattle."

"Intimately, huh?"

"Indeed. You are not a member of the League, but your contracts almost exclusively come from us. Whenever we need to get rid of someone, you take care of it. You are essentially already one of us. You are one of the best people we have on our side—certainly the most useful mercenary we've hired. You are an integral part of the way this city runs, whether you realize it or not. Because of that, I feel it's important for you to know who you're working for. You should know the purpose of the work you do."

I nodded that I understood.

"The very early beginnings of the League were starting to form fifty years ago. It started out as a very small group, but it was one of the only ones here at the time, so it grew quickly." He began slowly pacing again. "In the Wasteland, it's difficult to find people you can trust, but when you can, it's much better than being alone. That's what made being a member so alluring. It still is. Leaguers exchange resources and knowledge, they trade, they help each other. When you see someone walking down the street with an armband like yours, you know they're on your side. You're never alone."

He talked almost as though he wasn't one of them. "You don't have an armband," I noted.

"Do I need one? Would you forget who I am without the uniform to remind you?" he replied, and it seemed to me that he was skirting the question. He continued as though I hadn't interrupted. "We gradually gained more influence in the area. It's been a long time coming, but now we have over five thousand members, including some of the most skilled engineers and craftsmen in the northwest. We finally have the resources to bring this city back to its former glory. And you're helping us with that."

I laughed before I could stop myself, but quickly cut it off.

"Something's funny?" Anton asked. He looked unimpressed.

I hesitated, mentally squirming, but he'd probably press until I told him. "I fail to see how killing old drunks and tech geeks helps your cause." I preferred to at least be honest about what I did.

He paused, staring at me with that freezing gaze. "Perhaps I need to explain my point of view more thoroughly," he said. "A strong city needs someone to run it. A leader. A single, united government. And at the moment, we don't have that. There are too many players in this game, and our opponents refuse to quit playing. So we have to remove them."

I raised an eyebrow, unsure. "I know I'm not the most educated woman in the wastes, but to me that doesn't seem like the best way to get people on your side. The people out there hate me. What would they think if they knew you were sponsoring all the murders I've carried out?"

"Which is why we go to so much trouble to make sure people _don't_ know that we're connected to you. Including our own members," he added. "This is not an ideal situation, but it's a necessary one. An organization like ours doesn't become as strong as we are overnight, and it certainly doesn't do so without making sacrifices."

Sacrifices such as killing everyone and lying to your own people. I supposed politicians would always be the same, war or no war.

I was quiet, thinking of my last contract. Something about that had still been bothering me over the past week. "So why kill Gates? I was in his house—he put together all that computer stuff, didn't he? I don't know anything about those, but I do know I've never seen anything like that before. Whatever he was doing, it was something that could help in rebuilding the city. It seems to me that we'd be better off keeping people like him around instead of killing them off."

"It would have been, had he been on our side." Anton settled against the desk as he looked at me, his arms folded. "You didn't know him, did you?" It was more a statement than a question.

"No, I did not."

"Ms..." he trailed off and made a flippant gesture as he realized he had nothing to address me with. Apparently I'd never given _him_ my name, either. I wondered if I'd ever figure out what it was. "Mr. Gates was allied with the Regulators."

"So?"

He looked vaguely irritated at having to explain it. "They pose a large inconvenience to us, because they refuse to acknowledge our authority. For the past fifty years, both sides have been in a stalemate, each side silently hating the other but coexisting semi-peacefully because the League knew they couldn't beat the Regulators in a firefight and the Regulators couldn't attack us because there is not yet sufficient reason—other than your contracts, we really do little to harm anyone. It would conflict with their code, you see. But I would like to see that stalemate come to an end."

"Taking on the Regulators is a bit ambitious, even for me."

"I'm not asking you to take on the Regulators," he said. "I'm asking you to help me assemble a weapon I can use against them. The reason I asked to speak with you is that you have yet to complete a contract that was sent to you two weeks ago."

He meant the one on the ship, I realized. I'd almost forgotten about that. "I was having some trouble with that one."

"Some trouble?" he repeated, giving me a strange look. For the first time, I seemed to have caught him off-guard. I got the feeling that his opinion of me was gradually declining. I shrugged, offering no more explanation. He pushed away from the desk, moving closer to me.

"In five years, you have never been unable to fulfill a contract. Now a retrieval mission is confounding you?"

"It's not confounding me," I said defensively. "I could do it."

"Then why haven't you?"

"Why does it matter?" I countered. "A mini-nuke launcher would help, but it wouldn't make or break a victory against the Regulators."

"The mini-nuke launcher is irrelevant. We don't need it. That contract was a test-run. I needed to see if you were capable of making it on and off the ship. We need to know we have the right person for this."

At first, I was speechless. "A _test_? I nearly died out there! Several times!"

"But you didn't. That is more than anyone else who's been there can say.

"There is a missile silo from the Great War just south of the city. It was never used," he continued. I narrowed my eyes. "The missiles are launched remotely by a radio transmitter. And on that ship, there will be a similar radio transmitter that can be altered to connect to that silo."

It was a moment before I'd fully taken in that statement. "A missile silo?" I said slowly. I gaped at Anton. "Are you crazy? You want to bomb your own city?"

"Do not insult me by assuming that I have not thought this through. If fired on the Regulator's headquarters, the missile will demolish the building and all of its inhabitants with only minor damage to the surrounding area. You of all people would have a lot to gain from this. If you don't do it for the League, do it for yourself. The Regulators will be gone, and with them will go the bounty hunters."

The world had seen plenty of bombs already. It didn't need any more. The idea made even me sick. "I can't do that. Find someone else." I turned to leave.

"_Stille_," Anton said sharply, and I paused with my hand on the door handle.

"I think you've misunderstood." I heard him moving closer. He spoke in a low, clear voice. "You do not have an option."

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I could feel him standing behind me.

"I have no use for someone who won't follow orders. You already have the Regulators against you. Would you like to have the League after you as well? Because I can guarantee that we will find you long before they will."

I began to feel sick. I looked out the window at the beached ship in the ocean. The tattered red flag at the top of one of the poles stuck out straight in the wind, and seemed to be looking back at me, daring me.

Anton stepped back. I opened the door. I could not leave the place fast enough.

One of the Leaguers was waiting outside the door. As I closed it behind me, he waved a hand over his shoulder for me to follow him back down to the elevator.

Back on the ground, Bruce was waiting against the fence next to our weapons. None of the Leaguers seemed to have given him any trouble. I picked up my things.

"What happened?" he asked. He looked worried when he saw my expression.

"We have to go back to the ship." I started toward 1106, brushing past the last of the guards and stepping onto the street.

"For the mini-nuke launcher?"

"No. We need to get that piece of radio equipment so that Anton can remotely launch a missile at the Regulators' headquarters."

There was a pause, and then I felt Bruce's hand on my wrist. I stopped.

"So he can _what_?"

"We're blowing up the Regulators, I just said."

His expression was one of horror. "But that's—you can't—"

I shook his hand off my arm and continued walking.

"You can't just _kill_ them _all_ without warning! They wouldn't have a chance! And what if the misslie is bigger than they think? What if it's off-target, and hits the building next to it instead?"

"Stop it," I said, my voice brimming with danger. Bruce fell silent. "We don't have a choice," I said softly. "Either we can die, or they can."

"You don't know that. You've avoided the Regulators for this long. They might never find you."

"The Regulators are not the problem."

I did not have to explain further. He looked confused only for a moment. I felt a small spike of guilt as I looked at him. It wasn't fair that he had to do this, really. It wasn't fair that his life depended on doing something that he wanted so badly not to do. He was only even in danger because of me—I'd gotten the implants that made his life revolve around mine, and I was the one who'd chosen this career path. He'd gotten sucked into it without any say in the matter.

It wasn't fair that _I_ had to do this, as a matter of fact. Without meaning to, I had managed to completely ally myself with an organization that I hardly knew anything about, that was on their way to taking over the city.

I was sure that if I still had my memory intact, I wouldn't have been thinking any of this. The old Stille knew what she was doing. She must have known enough about the League and the Regulators to know that it was worth being for the former and against the latter. I would have to trust her judgement. I had little other choice.

I looked Bruce over for a moment, taking in the dark bruise on his cheek, the empty, resigned look on his face. "I'm sorry I hit you," I said, because I had nothing better to offer him. "I won't do that again." I had no problem fighting raiders or thugs, or doing my contracts, but attacking someone who couldn't defend himself, who depended on me, was weak, even if he did fucking stupid things sometimes.

He glanced up at me guardedly.

I hesitated. "I'm sorry you got dragged into this. But there's nothing I can do about it now. I can't do this contract without you. This is what's best for both of us right now. Let's get it over with and get on with our lives, alright?"

He gave a stoic nod. I glanced up with distaste at the space needle one last time, then started again toward 1106.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

Somehow, the warship looked less dangerous in the daytime. It was still enormous, but in the sunlight the wear and tear looked more sad than forbidding, and the waving seaweed and crustaceans on the side of the hull more playful than dangerous. I felt a certain confidence as I tethered our canoe to a bolt at the back of the ship, as I had before.

We climbed aboard, our footsteps clanking lightly on the metal floor. I paused as we stood, scanning the deck. The ghoul was nowhere to be seen. When we had waited and searched around on the top deck for long enough that I was starting to get impatient, I walked to a wall and rapped my gun against it several times. A loud banging echoed and vibrated through the ship.

"We know you're here," I called—not that he'd be able to understand. "Come on out."

There was no response. I waited, watching for movement behind pillars and around corners. There was an airy sound to my left, and I whipped around, following the sound with the barrel of my gun. It was a seagull that had landed on an antenna above us. It looked at me blankly, then lazily took off again.

"I'm sure he knows we're here. I suppose he's hiding down below somewhere, like last time," I said, lowering my gun.

"I doubt he wants to speak with us," Bruce said. "Especially when we're yelling and waving guns around," he added pointedly.

"Are you sure you can get him to cooperate with us?" I really doubted it. It would be much harder finding the transmitter on our own, but I wasn't sure we'd be able to get him to help.

"No," he admitted, "but if he's not too far gone, I think we'll be able to reason with him. There might be something he wants that we'll be able to offer him in exchange for the transmitter."

I gave him a skeptical look. "He was pretty far gone, Bruce."

"Maybe not," he argued. "I doubt there are any significant sources of radiation on the ship, and he has been here since the war. If he hasn't gone feral yet, he's not going to."

"Not being feral doesn't keep him from being crazy."

"It's not surprising for him to have developed some minor mental disorders after living alone for two-hundred years."

"Thank you for the explanation, but that still doesn't help us."

"I only meant that maybe you should not be so hard on him. The fact that he's survived this long alone is by itself impressive. He's obviously intelligent, despite suffering from hallucinations."

I gave him a small, bemused smirk. He was trying so hard to defend him. "Yeah, I guess," I gave in. "I just hope he's lucid enough for you to get through to him."

I turned to a door on the wall behind me—the one I'd used last time that led to the interior levels of the ship—and pulled on the thick handle. It screeched open. I watched the relative darkness inside. A shaft of sunlight cut through it halfway down the hallway, illuminating a slow swirl of dust motes in the air. I listened for human sounds, but if there were any, I couldn't distinguish them from the squeaks and vibrations in the rest of the ship. The ghoul knew he had the advantage in the halls of the ship as well as I did—I doubted he would be coming out any time soon. I hated to walk into what would most likely be an ambush, but we couldn't just stand outside forever.

I stepped inside, keeping my gun at the ready. Bruce slipped in beside me, leaving the door open to let the light in. "Don't be afraid to shoot if you have to," I said, my voice low as I walked forward, checking the rooms as we passed them. "If he's endangering me, shoot him. I'll do the same for you." He walked a few yards behind me, his feet quiet against the floor.

As we got deeper into the ship, I could hear the echoes of dripping and sloshing water. I closed my eyes for a moment as I listened, trying to hear something else. When I felt heat on my face, I opened them again. I'd walked into the weak daylight that streamed through a broken section of the ceiling. I held up a hand to shade my eyes. To my right, something shifted outside the ray of light. I tensed. As my gun arm moved to point toward the movement, I saw the human shape in the shadow of the doorway next to me. Something long, thin, and metallic flashed in the light.

My shot went wild as I twisted out of the way of the sword slashing toward my head. Before I could aim again the blade was lashing out again, then again, and it was all I could do to keep just out of reach, never mind fight back. Bruce was a short ways behind me, probably unable to get a clear shot with how quickly we ducked and dodged around each other.

The ghoul had a look of concentrated fury as he swung the sword at my legs, and as I leapt out of the way he quickly shifted his attack back to my face. I lost my balance and stumbled back as the tip of the blade nicked my cheek, and as I lost my balance he took the opportunity to turn on Bruce. There was a moment when the ghoul was still turning toward him and his shotgun was raised and aimed point-blank at the ghoul. The second seemed to stretch for much longer than it actually was as I waited for him to fire.

He didn't.

Instead he shouted something at the ghoul. His voice was enough to make the ghoul hesitate for a millisecond, but only that. Just as I fired, the ghoul feinted to one side and then the other. He'd moved enough that the bullets didn't kill him, but when they slammed into his shoulder with a wet thud, he shouted in pain. Bruce flinched at the gunshots, and somehow the ghoul managed to recover in an instant and had the presence of mind to pull him off-balance and down, so that the slave was between him and me before I had another clear shot. In one movement, he slithered into a crouch behind Bruce and swept the sword up under his throat. I panicked, but there was nothing I could shoot without hitting Bruce.

Before anything else could happen, Bruce began spewing out a string of loud, fast Chinese. I stared, and the ghoul froze. It was obviously something he'd rehearsed—there was no way he had already learned to talk that well without having practiced what he would say. It was a speech he'd worked on and memorized so that he could use it at this moment. The ghoul didn't interrupt him. I didn't move, fearing the wrath of that blade, so close to taking the life beneath it that I could almost feel it already happening. It made the nerves in the tips of my fingers tingle.

Finally, Bruce's voice slowed, and he hesitantly stopped talking, having said all he could. He swallowed thickly as he looked up at me, waiting for the ghoul to respond. It was silent for a long time, then the ghoul shuddered in pain. Bruce stiffened as the blade moved against his throat. His fingers tightened around the gun he held in front of him. When no one moved, I took a careful step to the side, trying for a better angle. Despite the ghoul's dire injury, he was not distracted enough not to notice. As I moved he shouted angrily, shifting farther down behind Bruce. I stopped, and after a moment he started speaking to his hostage. The strain in his voice was more obvious when he spoke quietly.

"I think he'll talk to us if we let him see to his injuries," Bruce translated softly.

I had to admit, I was impressed the ghoul hadn't passed out already. I grudgingly allowed myself to feel a small amount of respect for him. "Fine," I agreed.

The ghoul growled something else, and I could make out the word 'stimpak' in the middle of it. Frowning back, I reached into my pocket to get one, never moving my sights from the spot just to the right of Bruce's head. I kicked it across the ground to the slave. He handed it back to the ghoul, who grabbed it as quickly as he could with his shoulder still injured, before we could take it back.

The ghoul gestured weakly with his hurt arm for me to move away. As I stepped back, he slowly stood, still clutching Bruce tightly to him. I caught a glimpse of the ghoul's peeling face as he moved, but not enough for a clear shot. They inched over to the door next to them, and the ghoul reached behind him with his free hand to push it open. He slid inside, and for a moment I thought he would take Bruce with him. But then, in one flourish, he folded the sword away from him and shoved him toward me, then quickly shut the door and locked it behind him.

I stumbled as I caught him. When I'd regained my balance, and it was clear that the ghoul wasn't going to reemerge, I held him out at arm's length. I bent to look under his chin. His neck was untouched—the only marks on him were long-healed old scars. He took a deep breath, his eyes closed. I felt him slowly relaxing, and as he swayed a little I tightened my grip on him to keep him upright. "You okay?"

He was obviously still stunned, but he nodded and made a light movement of shrugging off my hands, so I let go of him. I stood straight again, lowering my gun to my side but not putting it away yet. "Idiot," I said, without any real venom. "Why didn't you shoot him?"

He didn't answer.

"You're such a softie," I told him. "I'm surprised it hasn't gotten you killed yet."

"There is a balance to be had between being 'soft' and letting yourself be hurt because of it," he said, almost sagely. "I didn't think he would want to kill me badly enough to silence the first person to speak to him in his own language for probably two hundred years."

I hadn't thought of that before, but he was right. Even if the ghoul hadn't been killing off everyone who came near the ship, there were no other Chinese people around. "You think he's _interested_ in talking? He still sees us as enemies, anyway, no matter what language we're speaking."

"I would be."

"You are already," I corrected him, smirking. "I can feel the eagerness coming off of you in waves. And that's saying something, for you."

"...Yes," he admitted.

I paused when I heard the sound of talking behind the door, but it was clearly not directed at us. I turned back to Bruce. I was reminded of the way he'd spoken to Dawkins when we went to get his asthma medicine. "You make friends wherever you go, don't you?"

"It has worked to our advantage," he pointed out.

"True," I agreed, not that I was fooled into thinking he was all business.

We went silent as we waited for the ghoul to reemerge. I half expected him to leave through another door in the room and circle around back to us, but I could still hear him moving inside.

After a few minutes, I heard the throaty voice from the other side of the door again. Bruce perked up and moved to stand against the wall next to the door. He said something back, and after a moment the ghoul replied.

"What's he saying?" I asked.

"He asks what we want."

"Well go on and tell him. I doubt he's using it. Maybe he'll just give it to us to get us to leave."

Bruce didn't look convinced, but he began talking to the ghoul again. He sounded much less sure of himself now, and his speech was slow as he picked his way through words. I waited while they spoke back and forth.

"He says we can't have it."

I stared at him. "Why not?"

"I don't know."

I sighed, and waited while they talked more. It went back and forth like that for a while, with Bruce forming weird sounds slow and careful, the ghoul talking back impatiently and mistrustfully, and me asking for translations periodically. Bruce tried to explain to him what had happened since the war. Unsurprisingly, the ghoul was not receptive to the information.

Eventually I sat down against the wall as I waited. After a while longer I set my gun down on the ground next to me and folded my arms. Not long after, Bruce did the same, sliding down the wall beside the door. I couldn't understand them, but I listened closely to changes in tone as they spoke. Chinese was a weird language—no matter what emotion they displayed, they spoke with lots of ups and downs with every word. It made it difficult to tell what was going on, but as the conversation went on, it seemed to grow more relaxed.

"I asked him to come out," Bruce said after a few minutes. "He says he will if you leave."

"That's not happening."

"Peaceful negotiations can't go on with a steel door between parties," he said with some exasperation. "Doing what he asks will go a long way toward getting him to trust us."

"Don't be so naive. He'll kill you the second I leave the room." I wasn't positive of that, but I wasn't positive it wasn't true, either. Had the ghoul decided not to kill him earlier because he really didn't want to, or because Bruce had been the only thing standing between my gun and his head?

"He won't." He sighed tiredly and looked over at me. "Please, just trust me."

I was going to point out what had happened when I'd done that during our last contract, but something about the way he said it got to me. It wasn't often that he asked me for something, but it was even less often that he spoke to me so sincerely. Some part of me wanted to hold on to that. I wished he would talk to me like that more often. I suddenly didn't want to argue with him.

He had already been more successful than I'd thought he'd be at placating the ghoul. In any case, if we wanted him to help us, we'd probably have to make a sacrifice like this at some point. He wasn't going to just waltz out with his hands up.

"Tell him I'll put my gun away," I said, "but I'm not leaving."

Bruce talked to the door. I holstered my gun, and waited. After a pause, I heard the ghoul reply again.

"He's coming out," Bruce stated suddenly.

Before I could react, the door swung open. I tensed. The ghoul did not emerge from the room. My hands twitched. I could just see him in the darkness of the room, half hidden behind the door. I held up my empty hands for him to see. Slowly, he came forward until he stood in the doorway. His sword was sheathed. As he stepped into the light my blood ran slightly cold, remembering looking up at that face from the water in the bottom of the ship. I firmly ignored the memory.

"Don't do anything to make him feel threatened," Bruce reminded me, "or we'll be back to square one."

"He feels threatened by us just being here," I muttered, but I set my hands down carefully on the knees of my crossed legs. I watched the ghoul in the low light as his eyes flicked between Bruce and me. He looked tired, now that he wasn't waving that sword around. I suppose I'd be tired, too, if I'd been fighting a war for 200 years. Getting shot probably didn't help, either. He'd taken his jacket off, but there was a concentrated streak of dark, wet, red down the left side of his shirt.

After a moment, he said something, looking at me rather than Bruce. I stared at him as he enunciated slowly, carefully.

"He says you've invaded his ship and he wants you to leave."

"No kidding," I muttered. Then, "Just me? What about you?"

He shrugged. "That's what he said. It probably applies to both of us."

The ghoul continued, and Bruce translated: "This is an act of aggression...if you want to negotiate, leave now. If you go to the main deck, I will speak with you there..." The ghoul gave me a hard look as he closed his mouth tightly. I wasn't going to get any more from him unless I conceded to this request as well.

I stood and backed down the hallway, and Bruce rose to follow. The ghoul didn't move from his doorway until we were halfway down the hall. I could hear him murmuring behind us.

"What's he saying?" I asked under my breath.

"I think he's talking about us," Bruce replied. "I can't tell. He knows I can't understand him very well. When he talks to me he uses simpler words and enunciates more clearly."

"Ask him who he's talking to."

He turned and spoke to the ghoul, who stopped murmuring and snapped something back at him. Bruce kept walking. "He says shut up."

I rolled my eyes. When we got to the door at the end of the hall we stepped outside (several sword lengths away from the door), then waited for him to come out behind us.

I could hear him on the other side of the door. He didn't come out right away. I was about to move to see what was taking him so long when it shut and something that sounded suspiciously like a lock slid into place.

I tried the door. It was indeed locked. And I thought this had been going okay. He'd wanted us out from the start. Now we were.

Bruce called through the door. Unexpectedly, the ghoul answered, in a weary voice. We could hear him quite clearly despite the several inches of steel between us. There must have been a crack between the door and the frame.

"What's he doing?" I waited while they exchanged questions back and forth a few more times.

Bruce turned to me. "I think this might take longer than I thought."

He quietly related the conversation to me after each exchange:

_"What did you do that for?"_

_ "We don't have to be in the same room to talk."_

_ "We don't mean any harm, we're not the enemy."_

_ "You're American." _

_ "The United States and China are not at war anymore." _

_ "Do you think I'm stupid?" _

_ "How long have you been here?" _

_ "Tell me what you really want," _he said, sidestepping the question entirely.

_"I told you, we just want to borrow the transmitter." _

_ "No one would take on an entire enemy ship for something so insignificant." _

_ "But it's hardly an entire ship; you're the only one here." _

Another pause. _"No," _he answered simply. He even sounded like he believed it. _"I am not telling you anything, and I am not giving you anything, so just leave." _

As Bruce was making his answer, I heard a small noise behind us, coming from the water. "_Shhh! _Stop!" I hissed to Bruce, and listened. There came a voice that carried over the edge of the boat, sounding distant by the time it reached us, but I could tell it was nearby. Then another voice. Two, no, three, at least. Scavengers? We couldn't have that. The ghoul would think we'd brought them—they'd mess everything up.

I unslung my rifle from my back and walked softly to the edge of the deck. Leaning over the railing, I could see a small wooden boat carrying three men next to the ship. They were all talking—not loudly, but definitely not trying to hide the sound. They must not have been as superstitious as the rest of the city. "Hey," I said in a loud whisper, hoping my own voice wouldn't carry behind that door. One of the men stopped talking and looked up. The others followed his gaze, craning their necks, and they had the sort of looks that told me they probably wouldn't leave just because I told them to. I tried anyway. "This spot's taken. Go somewhere else." I held the rifle at my side, making sure it was in clear view but not yet pointing at them.

"Hey fuck you, bitch," one of them replied loudly, reaching for his own gun. Before he could draw it I'd lifted mine and squeezed off a round. The man—the corpse—toppled backward, nearly capsizing the small boat. Another man fumbled for his weapon and met a similar fate, tipping sideways with a spray of blood.

I turned to the third occupant of the boat, his shocked face huge in my scope. He quickly raised his hands next to his head in surrender. "I'll go! I'll go!" he said. When I didn't shoot, he unceremoniously kicked each of his companions into the water and took up the oars. He began paddling frantically backward, then paused to look up at me again.

"Are you really a ghost?" he asked.

"Yes."

He looked like he wasn't sure he believed me, but even so, he quickly started rowing toward the shore again.

When he was some ways off, I returned the rifle to my back and turned back to the door in the middle of the deck. I stopped when I saw the ghoul standing off to the side of the door, his sword drawn, ready to defend the ship. He'd gotten partway across the deck to me before he'd stopped, apparently to watch the exchange. The look on his face was one of confusion, but it settled back into mild anger as soon as he saw me looking at him.

He glanced back at Bruce, who didn't seem to have moved the whole time. Then back at me.

_"You attack your own people?"_

"I don't have people," I said flatly.

He looked perturbed at this, but did not reply.

"All we want is the transmitter," I said. "Help us find it, and we'll leave you alone and never come back."

As Bruce relayed this, the ghoul frowned. _"I'm sure America has its own radio parts. Why do you need ours?" _

Bruce answered this time, coming forward to point at the city. _"Because it's too hard to find in a country that stopped running two-hundred years ago. There is no place to buy the part. Do you see the disrepair the city's fallen into?" _

The ghoul looked at the skyscrapers for a long moment. From here I could see several that had collapsed completely and one that was leaning on another one. _"That's what it always looks like,"_ he said carefully._ "It is a broken city." _

For a long time they talked as Bruce tried to prove to him that the Great War was long over. The ghoul put his sword away. Sometimes he seemed to almost want to believe him, but he would quickly revert to suspicion and anger just when I thought Bruce might be getting through to him. But he never became upset enough to retreat back into the ship or attack again. It must have been nice enough to talk to someone—regardless of whether he consciously realized how long it had been—that he didn't mind who he was speaking with.

By the time Bruce spoke to me, it took me a moment to realize he was speaking English again.

"Ma'am?"

It sounded like it was the second or third time he'd tried to get my attention. I raised my eyebrows as I turned to him and saw the ghoul already opening the door to the interior of the ship.

"We've come to an agreement," Bruce told me. He looked pleased with himself, in his own way. No one else would have noticed, but I'd been around him long enough that I was getting better at divining his moods. Maybe it was his posture that had changed, or his tone of voice.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"He's going to give us the transmitter. He knows where to find it." He followed the ghoul inside, and I walked back into the darkness behind him, shutting the door after us.

I was surprised they'd reconciled their differences at all. It had taken the better part of an hour, but I hadn't really expected it to happen at all today. But of course, I doubted he would give it to us for nothing no matter how persuasive Bruce was. "In exchange for...?"

"My shotgun."

"You can't give him that," I said reproachfully. Guns weren't rare, but good ones were difficult to come by, and they were expensive.

"He wants nothing else. It's alright, we can find another one later."

"You should have asked me."

"I will ask you next time," he assured me, not very convincingly. The ghoul turned to see what was holding us up, and gestured for us to come.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"He's taking us to the room that has their communications equipment. The transmitter is in there."

"Can't he just get it himself?"

"I can't describe it to him well enough for him to understand what we need. He's just going to take us there and we can find it ourselves."

"He doesn't have a problem with us being in here?" I said, a little taken aback.

"I doubt that," Bruce said, "But this way he at least knows where we are. He says the radios don't work, but if the part is still intact then it shouldn't be a problem."

We turned a corner, went through a small room and down a narrow, steep staircase. We entered a new hallway, smaller than the main one I'd used before. It grew very dark as we descended inside the ship. The ghoul took a flashlight from a pocket and clicked it on. It flickered moodily, and he hit it impatiently against the wall. I resisted the urge to cover my ears at the noise. After a few strikes, something in the light fell into place and it shone steadily.

Finally we came to a communications room. It was small, lined with control panels. The ghoul stepped aside to let us search for whatever it was we needed. I realized as I was looking around the room that I didn't know what this thing looked like.

"Hey Bruce..." I started, but he was already unscrewing the top covering on one of the panels with a screwdriver that, of course, I hadn't thought to bring but he had. I went to look over his shoulder, my shoes squelching as I moved. "You know where it is?"

"No, but this is as good a place as any to start looking. Is that alright?" he asked, not stopping to see if I would agree.

"Yeah, fine."

"How will you know when you find it?"

"One of the Leaguers gave me a note while I was waiting for you that shows what it looks like. I think I'll know it when I see it."

I shone my light down into the control panel for him while he dug. He continued without comment, moving to peer past lights and wires. When he had worked for some time and found nothing, he gave up and replaced the metal sheet that covered the electronics.

I was at first confused about why he bothered—the machine was obviously not functional—but watching how carefully he handled the piece and the way he thoroughly twisted in every screw, I guessed he did it out of respect for the ghoul, who stood with his back to the far wall, staring at some spot in the air near the ceiling. As I'd suspected, Bruce's care was wasted—he wasn't even paying attention. However, just as I was thinking this, the ghoul seemed to notice me watching him and suddenly shifted his gaze to me. I stiffened involuntarily. I was reminded of the way he'd looked after pushing me through the hole in the floor. Not because the expressions were similar, but because of how much they contrasted. When I'd looked up at him from the water I'd almost doubted that I was looking at a living person—perhaps he wasn't a ghoul, he simply really was a walking corpse, because nothing alive could be that cold. But for a moment when he looked at me now I could see the tinges of fear and uncertainty in his face before he had the chance to hide it.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, however, it was gone, and he was just disdainful again. He crossed his arms and glared back at me.

"Could you...?" Bruce nodded to the flashlight that I still held over the control panel. He'd moved on to the next one. I moved next to him again and raised the light over the screw he was currently working on.

A few minutes later, Bruce made a satisfied sound and carefully pried something out of the wall of electronics. He held it up in his own light, now that he had both hands available. The object looked like a circuit board, small enough that it could fit in the palm of your hand. It was kind of annoying how small and simple it was. All that effort, for this.

Several metal prongs stuck out of one side. Aside from that it looked like much of the rest of the inside of the panels, but it must have been unique enough that Bruce could tell it apart from the rest of the parts inside. It was not wet, unlike most of the rest of the ship. Which reminded me: "Won't it get messed up if we take it back under the water?"

Bruce paused, and frowned at the device. "Probably," he agreed. He turned to the ghoul and said something, aiding the words with the usual hand gestures and pauses as he searched for phrases. After a minute the ghoul waved a hand to indicate he understood well enough and Bruce could stop stammering. He turned and walked through the door we'd come in and down the hall. He turned into another room, and then down another hall, and into another room, and up a flight of stairs. Unlike other stairs I'd seen on the ship, this flight didn't stop off at each level—as we climbed up and up I realized it must be taking us even further up, to the structure that was built up above the deck.

As we got closer to the top it got brighter as light shone through cracks and rusted-through gaps in the walls. But it was still a shock when the ghoul thrust open a door to the outside. The white light of the sky glared in, and for a moment I had to cover my eyes. When they adjusted, I carefully followed him outside onto a small platform with a railing around it. It was only after I'd stepped onto it that I realized it was suspended in the air off the edge of the structure, creaking in the wind. The ghoul said something, gesturing to a ladder that hung from the edge of the platform. It only went about three-fourths of the way down to the deck below, but it was close enough. He waved at something invisible near his head, as though swatting a bug, then climbed down. Bruce and I followed him down. I winced as I hit the metal floor too hard. Imaginary pain went through my prosthetic.

The ghoul stood impatiently to the side with his arms crossed.

"We're going, we're going," I muttered, walking back to our canoe. "You should probably thank him, I guess," I said to Bruce.

"I did."

"Of course." As we climbed into the boat, I glanced curiously back at the ghoul. He switched between watching us and looking back at the "broken" city. Maybe something was finally starting to sink in for him. I looked down at the transmitter. The city was going to be even more broken after this.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

The transmitter was sitting on a shelf in the office with all the posters. The same place I'd put it when we got back from the ship. Neither of us had touched it since then. Bruce had gotten out the chess board again. I could see him eyeing the transmitter from where he sat, cross-legged on the other side of the board.

"What are you looking at?" I asked as I waited for him to move, though I knew very well what it was, and he knew I knew. Most of my pieces were gone; I was down to my king, queen, and a few pawns. He was a move or two away from beating me.

"Why haven't you taken the transmitter to Anton yet?" he replied.

"It can wait," I said evasively.

I moved a pawn, for lack of any better options. I wasn't very interested in the game.

"You don't have to give it to him," Bruce said, sounding hopeful.

I looked up at him, my head propped in my hands. "You don't want to give him the transmitter?" I said, but it wasn't really a question. Of course he didn't. "Then we'll never be rid of the Regulators. They'll catch us someday. They came close at Gates' house. It's not impossible. It will be even worse with the League against us, too."

He squinted at the board and moved his queen slowly to the side, trapping me. Checkmate.

"Not that you care, I suppose. Your only problem is the implant. If they figure that out, they'll wait until it's out before they kill me and they'll let you go. Even the League would do that, don't you think? If my death is made public, it'll look good for them to have helped you."

"I don't think the Regulators would let me go."

"Why? It's not like you could not have helped me. What other choice do you have?"

"There's always a choice."

"Doesn't mean it's a good one."

"No."

"So why are you still here, if you don't think you should be?"

"I'm not a hero."

I narrowed my eyes. "No," I said, "You're smart." My joints cracked as I stood up, decidedly not looking in the direction of the transmitter. There was a twinge in my left foot. I ignored it. "Do you want to go shoot raiders with me?"

He gave me a blank look at the change of subject. "What?"

"Do you want to go and shoot raiders with me."

He hesitated. "Why?"

I shrugged. "There's nothing else to do. Let's be heroes."

After a moment of indecision, he left the chess board as it was and went to pick up the gun he'd left propped against the wall.

"That's the way," I said with a smile. "Hey, there might even be a damsel in distress for you to save."

"I hope not."

-lll-

As it happened, there was no damsel. Just raiders. I hadn't counted how many of them we killed, but it was quite a few. More than I'd been able to get by myself. Bruce wasn't as pleased about this as I was, but he was never really pleased about anything.

When we'd cleared them all out (or at least until there weren't any more stragglers coming forward) we retreated before more were attracted to the carnage. I had a bullet in my arm to deal with. When you get shot, it's time to go home.

I sent Bruce to check for contracts while I went home and dug the bullet out of my biceps. Many drips of blood and a bandage later, I was finished. I wiped some of the blood off the counter, then tossed the towel in the sink and walked out into the office. I glanced out the window, and was confronted with the crown of the space needle again. I quickly looked away. It wasn't long before I heard Bruce coming up the stairs again.

"That was fast," I said. "Did you get anything?"

"Yes," he said, coming closer. "They don't seem to be holding it against you that you haven't delivered the transmitter yet." He pulled a sheet of paper from a pocket on his jacket and began reading it to me.

One more person to kill. A ghoul. A man. There was a short description, not that that was worth much when it came to ghouls. There was no steady location listed, but they'd somehow found out where he was going to be a few days from now. They gave a window of four evenings when he might be at a bar in Pike Place. I'd have to go every day until he showed up. Easy enough. And the window was far enough away that it would give my arm a chance to heal. Not that I couldn't have done the contract whether it was healed or not, but it would have been less pleasant if it was still bleeding while I was trying to work.

So we waited a few days. Bruce went back to reading his books. I mostly just paced. Occasionally I wandered back into Bruce's room, but I usually didn't bother him. Just making sure he was still there, I guess. He would look up at me questioningly, and I would shrug, look out the window, and leave, and he'd go back to whatever he'd been doing.

I think he really did hate it. What I did for a living, that is. And having to help me. And I was beginning to understand why.

It wasn't as if this job was something I'd need a lot of help with. In fact, it might have been easier without him, in a situation where we were out in public like this. There wasn't much point in him coming. So on the first day I was supposed to go out, I asked him whether he wanted to come. He looked vaguely confused, then shook his head in an almost experimental way, as if he wasn't sure what would happen if he did so. I shrugged, slid on my jacket, and left without any more talk about it.

I didn't get lost on the way to Pike. And the bar itself wasn't that hard to find. The entire market wasn't that big, really. If you wandered for ten minutes or so you could find anything there. So after a while I found myself in the lower sections, and stopped at the flickering purple neon sign above a doorway at the end of a hallway. There was a lot of motion in the dark room beyond, and a layer of smoke hovered near the ceiling. I could hear the murmur of the patrons' collective voices, even from outside. The bar was crowded. Good.

I bought a beer and sat down at a small, round, metal table in a corner; one of the only open ones I'd seen. I opened the bottle and set it down on the sticky table, but did not make any move to drink it. Instead I settled in to watch. People came and left, most of them in pairs. I wondered if the target would be with anyone. The contract hadn't said he would, but it didn't say for sure that he'd be alone, either. It seemed strange that he would be here at such a specific time, and by himself, anyway.

A few hours passed, and it got to be late. He didn't come. When I saw the place was starting to clear out, I left before it could get too empty. The second day I went back but had the same results. A ghoul came in once, but it was a woman. No one bothered her, but it took her a good few minutes to get the attention of the bartender.

The third day, I spotted him. He was alone, as far as I could tell. I'd been looking away when he came in, and now he was facing away and mostly obscured by people between me and him, but what I could see matched the description. I tapped a finger against my beer as I watched him walk up to the bar and wait for one of the servers to notice him. I snorted under my breath, but to my surprise one of the people behind the bar hurried over to him.

My view was obstructed as someone moved in front of my table. I waited for him to move. When he didn't, I glanced up. He was looking at me.

"What?" I said flatly.

He pulled out the chair in front of me and sat down, his eyes not moving from mine the whole time. For a time that probably seemed much longer than it really was, he stared at me. I was frozen to my seat.

"I'm John," he said. He paused. "I think we ought to talk."

I didn't say anything. He couldn't know. Was he with the League? He wasn't wearing an armband.

"What's your name?"

"What do you want?" I said levelly. Under the table, I reached slowly for my gun.

"We'll get to that," he said with a smirk. "First tell me your name, beautiful."

I stopped. "What?"

He only raised his eyebrows suggestively in response. I stared blankly at him. After a moment, I remembered the ghoul at the counter and looked over the top of the man's head to see. The ghoul was placing a bag on the counter. The bartender leaned in and said something to him. The ghoul nodded, and the bartender took the sack and put it under the counter.

"Go away," I said to the man across from me.

"Don't be like that—"

"I said fuck off."

The man remained where he was, one side of his mouth quirked upward.

"I'm not interested in men. If you don't get out of here you're going to regret it."

He didn't seem to notice the second sentence. He leaned forward, setting his hand on my knee. "I could change that."

I moved my gaze back to him and dropped my hand down on top of his. I paused, considering, then forced the hint of a smile. I leaned forward as well, lowering my voice conspiratorially. "Let's go outside."

The man smiled back confidently, though I could see the mild surprise he was trying to hide. "I knew you'd see it my w—" He choked as I stood up suddenly and jerked him to his feet. I pulled him along by the hand as I wove through the crowd.

There was a wave of cool air as we stepped through the door. As I moved away from the door, the man pulled on my hand to turn me back to him. I let him. He gave me a sleazy smile, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Instead, I placed my hand on the back of his neck, shoved, and slammed his head into the brick wall of the outside of the bar.

He shouted as he stumbled back, clasping his hands to his nose. Blood dripped through his fingers. "You bitch," he choked, and drew a switchblade from somewhere. I just crossed my arms and waited. Maybe inside he hadn't been able to see how big I was, but out here it only took him a second to think better of it and turn tail.

As he turned the corner and ran out of sight, I went back inside. I pushed the people in the doorway aside and looked to the bar—and saw nothing. The ghoul was gone. I muttered a curse and scanned the crowd. I would have seen him come back out the door; he must still be in there somewhere. I looked between the dark, smokey corners of the room. There were people everywhere, but no ghoul.

Between the counter and the side wall, there was a short hall that seemed to lead to the back of the building, toward the water. There was nobody back that far, but I thought I saw movement just as I looked over. I shoved through the crowd, to the annoyance of a few patrons, but no one stopped me. At the end of the hall was a door. Without a glance back I pushed through it, and found myself outside again, on the wooden decks behind the market. They were empty. There were paths leading in several directions. Drawing my knife from its sheath, I closed the door behind me and listened.

There was a sound, to the right. Behind the bar. I stepped carefully toward it, and the wood beneath my feet creaked. I paused, took another step, and there was another creak. There was no opportunity for stealth here. So instead I walked normally, hoping that that wouldn't arouse as much suspicion as someone trying to be quiet would. Around the corner, I saw the shadow of someone around the side of another building, moving to the south. I picked up my pace slightly and followed. As I got to the next building I just caught the ghoul turning around another corner. Gripping my knife tighter, I walked a little faster.

When I turned the next corner, I'd gained on him significantly. He wasn't carrying anything; his bag was gone now. Probably a good idea. The less it looked like you had, the less likely you were to get killed for whatever you were carrying. Not that it was going to do him any good this time.

He didn't look back as I followed him. When I was several yards away, I quickened my pace for the last few steps between us, and he was turning to look over his shoulder when I grabbed him, shoved him against the wall, and put the blade to his neck. But just before I drew it across his throat, I stopped. My jaw dropped as I looked at the man in front of me.

It was Dawkins.

For a moment both of us were so surprised that we did absolutely nothing. Then he snarled and shoved me away with both hands.

"What in god's name are you doing? Have you lost your mind?" he nearly shouted.

I held up my hands in a placating gesture, the knife still in one of them. "Shhh."

"Don't shush me, you imbecile." He shook his head at me in disbelief. "How can you live with yourself?"

"Shut up," I said coldly.

"Sorry, but not _everyone_ will follow your orders like a kicked dog."

I gritted my teeth and pushed him back against the wall, covering his mouth with one hand. Without missing a beat he brought a knee up into my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I choked and fell to my knees. The ghoul picked up the knife I dropped and held it in front of my face.

"If it wasn't for Bruce, I'd have turned you in at the first opportunity," he growled, crouching inches away from me. I watched my reflection in the knife. "I'm not going to let this go on any longer. You're going to regret this. Do you understand? You just made the biggest mistake of your life."

He threw the knife to the ground, stood, and walked away.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

When I opened the door to 1106, I could already hear Bruce rushing down the stairs. I locked the door behind me, frowning, and hurried to the stairwell. "Bruce?"

He appeared on the landing above me. "Someone followed you," he said in a hushed voice, as though afraid someone would hear. "I saw from the window."

"What?" I took the stairs two at a time, up to the next floor. "Who? Are they still there?" I leaned on the windowsill. I could see a few people across the street. None were looking this way.

Bruce came up next to me calmly, holding his hands behind his back. "A Regulator."

"Shit," I whispered.

"I don't see him. I think he's gone."

"You're sure he wasn't just walking by?"

He shook his head slowly. "He was following you."

I reluctantly turned away from the window and leaned against the wall. "Are you sure?" I asked again.

Bruce only raised his eyebrows at me.

I closed my eyes. This was okay. It didn't mean they knew anything. At the most he'd seen me fail to attack someone.

"Can't believe I didn't see him," I muttered.

Bruce shrugged, though he looked worried, too. "Well...now we've both made that mistake."

I looked out the window at the people sitting across the street. They looked back and forth across the street. _They_ knew to keep an eye out.

"I was distracted," I said.

"Distracted?"

"I didn't complete the contract."

"You can go back tomorrow. He has to show up eventually."

"I didn't complete the contract because the target was Dawkins."

Bruce's eyes widened. "That's...unexpected. But not surprising that they would put a hit out on him, I suppose."

"Sometimes I feel like I'm not very good at this."

He paused, looking like he was deciding what to say. "You used to be. Before."

"What happened to me?"

"You changed."

"Mhmm."

"All of your skills were learned before the accident, and not all of them rely just on muscle memory. It's understandable to have forgotten some of them."

"Yeah."

"If you'd killed him..." he trailed off for a moment, and his voice became very somber. "I couldn't make my medicine by myself, even if I had the recipe. And if I didn't have the medicine I wouldn't be able to function. So...thank you."

I had a vague urge to make some kind of joke. "You're welcome," I said instead. "But I don't know if you should thank me just yet. He may hold a bit of a grudge against me for nearly killing him."

"Against you, maybe. Not me. He already disliked you."

"Maybe. But we have more urgent problems anyway. We can't stay here."

"I agree."

"So where do we go?"

"I don't know," he said honestly. "They already know about the place we stayed at in Pioneer Square. There and here were the only places we've lived long-term. We'd have to go someplace new."

"I'm open to ideas."

"Anywhere would work as well as anywhere else, I suppose. It only needs to be someplace unoccupied and out of the way. A locking door would also be ideal."

"How did we find the key to this place?"

"Luck. There was a spare in a cabinet in the basement."

Suddenly, the image of Bruce walking down a narrow set of stairs leading underground surfaced in my mind. He reached a gate at the end of the stairs and opened it...with a key.

"What about the Underground?" I asked.

-lll-

We left without much fuss. It wasn't like we had a lot of stuff to take with us. I packed my backpack with all of my ammo and the food we had lying around. Bruce took as many books as he could fit in his pack. We locked the door, for the last time, and he pocketed the key. I glanced around the alley. Someone at the other end of the street leaned against a wall, but it was a Leaguer, judging by the band on their arm, not a Regulator. At least I hoped so.

"Let's get out of here," I muttered, and started down the road.

"It's this way," Bruce said, gesturing in the opposite direction. I followed him South through downtown and to the opposite edge of the city, where, in a secluded alley, he paused at the top of a flight of stairs. I looked surreptitiously around us.

"I don't see anyone," I said.

"You wouldn't," Bruce said, "if they didn't want you to." But he took out a small ring of keys and started down the stairs anyway. With one last glance behind me, I followed him into the dark.

I felt a little like I was being let in on some secret as we went through the door. It was an odd place, and unsurprisingly dark, wet, and cold. Bruce's flashlight swept over the brick archways, steel beams, and rusted pipes that lined the walls as we stepped through puddles that rippled under drips from the ceiling. I _was_ surprised at how empty of people it was.

"Why is there no one else down here?" I asked as we walked through the tunnel. I ducked under a fallen beam.

"Regulators," he said. "They came down a few years ago and kicked everyone out. They called it a breeding ground for crime. There were news leaflets about it."

"What about the mediator?"

"They can't keep everyone out. And he knows what he's doing. He knows how to keep a low profile and keep the other riff raff out. It works for him. And us."

His flashlight stopped on a crude hole in the wall. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the bricks to make a narrow doorway. He peered into the hole, then stepped inside.

"Do you know where you're going?"

"Not really."

I frowned in the dark. "Is that going to be a problem?"

"Not really."

"Is that an echo?"

"It doesn't echo much in here. Too much dirt and wood, maybe. Too many uneven surfaces."

"Right..."

We took a few more turns and went through another awkwardly small opening (for me, at least) and ended up in a largish room with a wooden floor. Most of it wasn't pried up or broken. It was even relatively clean. Light pushed its way through a small skylight of grimy glass blocks. We decided to stop there. It was freezing cold and dark, but it was out of the way and hard to get to.

For the next while I paced the halls, pausing at strange sounds, but there was never anyone there. I got lost a few times but there were always landmarks to point me back to our room. There was never any sign of Regulators. Or anyone else, for that matter. I didn't know where the mediator was holed up, but it must have been somewhere far away from where we were. We were there for three days before I ventured to the surface again.

No guns and cowboy hats met me as I opened the door to the stairwell, which was nice. I squinted in the waning sunlight and climbed to the road above.

There was a sound behind me, and I jumped. Bruce was quietly shutting the door behind him. "Oh," I said with a small sigh. "You getting claustrophobic too?"

"I don't like it down there much. Back at the training camp where I grew up, they put kids who misbehaved in underground shelters by themselves."

"Uh...wow," I said. "You know, you don't..." I'd been about to tell him he didn't have to stay down there, but he couldn't go very far without me, and where else was there for us to go?

He climbed the stairs, but only halfway. "I don't mind. It's just not a good thing to think about. But now I can go outside whenever I want."

I had no reply to that.

He looked up at the stars that were beginning to show themselves in the twilight, then back at me. "I don't know that it's a good idea to leave yet."

"No. I know." I sat at the top of the stairs. "But we're going to have to leave sometime. We need food, money..."

"I know."

"What are we going to do?"

"I don't know."

I leaned back against the wall of the building. Why was I suddenly so tired? "Were you glad to leave that place?" I asked Bruce, to change the subject, and out of curiosity. "The training camp?"

"No."

I smiled at him quizzically. "No?"

"No," he said, almost defensively. He shrugged, and took a moment before responding. "That's where I grew up. I had some friends there. The closest I have to family, I suppose. It was strange to leave."

"That sounds weird."

Now he definitely looked defensive. "Maybe, but it's all I had."

"Hey, I didn't say there was anything wrong with it," I said quickly. "Did you ever go back there?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"The opportunity never arose."

"We could, maybe, if this all settled down," I offered.

"No. Everyone I knew will be gone, anyway. It doesn't matter," he said. "And anyway, I don't hold out much hope of this all blowing over soon." He was quiet for a long time. Then he spoke, in a lowered voice. "It doesn't seem as if it's going to end well, does it? The Regulators keep getting closer to us, and your contracts aren't going well at all."

"Thank you for pointing that out," I muttered. "And why are you so at ease with our imminent death, anyway?"

"I don't know. What happens will happen."

"I'm not giving myself up," I vowed. "You can count on that. If I'm going down, I'm going down fighting."

"I wouldn't expect you to. And that is a good plan. They would probably kill you on sight if you tried to surrender."

I wasn't going to surrender, but I wasn't going to force Bruce to go down with me, either. I'm not sure why I happened to realize it then. I suppose I'd been thinking about it for a while. I'd been too afraid to let him leave, before. Afraid of being on my own. It didn't really matter now.

"Did you say there's someone who can take these chips out of us?"

He looked up at me when I asked, and as he did, his eyes widened. He was looking at something behind me. As he stood up, I turned and reached for my gun. Before I could see what was behind me, I felt something sting my neck. Everything went black.

-lll-

At first, when I woke up, I couldn't move. It was dark. I couldn't open my eyes. What little I could hear was distant and confusing. I felt strangely heavy and compressed. A pang of fear ran through me and I wondered if I was dead.

My chest hurt, though. Boy did it hurt. I wondered if you could feel pain after you died. I tried to stretch my arm. I could feel it lying beside me on something hard. It didn't respond to my commands. Not so much as a twitch. I think that was even worse than the thought of being dead.

There was a sharp spike of pain in my chest again as something touched it. Another lightning bolt of fear hit me as I realized my vest was off.

I strained to move something. Someone prodded at a spot beneath my collarbone. There was a very unpleasant tugging sensation, and more sharp pain. They were taking out my implant, I realized drowsily. Clumsily, it felt like.

I got my finger to move, just the slightest bit. A small sound escaped my throat. Whatever was touching the cut on my chest came to a stop. I struggled to raise my eyelids. They were so heavy. When I dragged them open, a bright light invaded my vision and seared my eyes. I quickly squinted them shut again. I writhed minimally on the hard, cold surface I was lying on. Everything was so _heavy_, I couldn't move. Not enough.

"She's waking up," I heard Bruce say. A terrible rage came over me. Something I hadn't felt since I lost my memory. Betrayal, I thought. That's what betrayal felt like.

"The tranquilizer wasn't supposed to have worn off yet," came a scratchy voice on my other side. It was that goddamned ghoul. "Her metabolism must be too high for the dose I gave her. Get ready." He dug into the incision again. So he knew how to get it out without killing Bruce. After another few painful moments, there was a rip as he pulled the thing out. I tried to yell, and managed a groan instead. I opened my eyes again then, and there was a silhouette in front of the light—a pair of tweezers holding a bloody square of metal. I squinted and rolled my head over the cold metal beneath me. My arm moved and slipped over the edge of the surface. I was on a table.

"It's done. Do it," said Dawkins, stepping away from the table.

I gradually brought my arms up to my chest and rolled to the side slightly, away from the light, and as I turned there was an object in my face. I squinted at it, and it slowly blurred into place. The barrel of a sawed-off shotgun—the new one Bruce had bought after we went to the ship, almost identical to his old one. I followed the arms holding it up to the pale, bespectacled face behind it. The look he gave me showed no particular expression, but his jaw was so tense.

"Bruce," the ghoul urged. "She'll be able to move soon."

There was a minute movement as his finger tensed on the trigger. For a long moment, he did nothing. His throat moved as he swallowed. Then he looked back up at Dawkins. "I told you, things have changed, I never asked you to—"

"Bullshit you didn't ask me to!" Dawkins retorted. I squinted back at him darkly. I really did not like him. "We've been talking about this for the past five months."

Bruce looked at him gravely but didn't reply. After a moment, there were several quick footsteps as Dawkins crossed the floor back to the table, and there was a shadow over me as he reached across to take the gun from Bruce. Well. I wasn't going to let _him_ kill me. That fucker had no right to kill me; he hardly even knew me.

As he took the shotgun and was pulling it back toward him, I reached up and grabbed the barrel. He tried to rip it away from me, and I just barely kept my hold on it as I brought up my other hand, gritting my teeth, and wrapped it around the gun as well. My knuckles were white as we fought for the weapon. Bruce stood to the side and did nothing.

Gathering all the strength I could muster, I twisted the gun, brought the butt up, and slammed it into the ghoul's face. His grip loosened, and I took the chance to wrest the gun from his hands. As he staggered back, I quickly turned it on him.

"Get away from me," I hissed through my teeth. He stopped moving as he processed what had just happened, holding a hand to his head. Then he took another few steps back. The look on his face probably could have melted a hole in the wall. I didn't worry about Bruce. He was motionless on the other side of the table.

I slowly sat up, propping myself up with my free arm. After pausing to catch my breath, I pulled myself toward the side of the table with one arm, holding the gun in the other. As I came near the edge I half-slid, half-fell to the floor. There was something stiff beneath me. Looking down, I saw I'd landed on my vest. I pulled it out from under me and shouldered it on slowly as I watched the ghoul and listened for Bruce behind me. I had a gun now, but so what? I was in the middle of a fenced-in compound full of nightkin, and my head was still swimming. Whatever he'd drugged me with, it was potent.

I glanced down at my chest. It was more than just a cut, I saw. He'd simply sliced off the entire piece of skin that had covered the implant, leaving a large red square of flesh. He'd probably thought it wouldn't matter—he was planning to kill me anyway.

Very carefully, making sure not to let myself visibly wobble, I grasped the edge of the table and pulled myself to my feet. I stopped to let my head settle again. The room was quiet, though I could hear nightkin somewhere outside. I turned and gave Bruce a questioning look. He hadn't moved. He met my eyes, but told me nothing.

There was movement in front of me and I turned to see the ghoul rushing at me. Instinctively I threw my arm up to block his. Something sharp slid across my arm as I grabbed his wrist and twisted. The needle fell out of his hand. If I'd been running on all cylinders I would have been able to stop it entirely. As it was, it just left me with another red mark on my forearm. Dawkins halted again as I shoved the gun against his chest.

He glowered at me when I didn't shoot. "Well?" he prompted.

I took a deep breath. I could hardly think, but I was lucid enough to know that Dawkins was the only way I was getting out of here. I'm sure he knew it too, the ass. But he at least had enough of a sense of self-preservation not to bank on it. He didn't want to get shot any more than I did.

There was a sound outside. The scrape and thud of large, heavy feet. A shadow fell across the doorway. I scrambled behind the ghoul holding the gun to his head. The nightkin in the hall emerged into view, filling the entire doorway. It bent to look through the opening, and looked at us dully.

"Hey!" I called to it. "Fuck off or I'm blowing this guy's head off."

It stared a bit longer, then growled. Not one of the smarter ones.

"I can kill him a lot faster than you can get all the way over to me," I reminded him. "Then where would you get your drugs? That wouldn't work out very well for you."

The nightkin snarled, and backed away from the door. I took a step forward, pushing the chemist in front of me. Bruce was still standing next to the table, looking at the floor.

"Hey," I said.

He looked up.

"So are you staying here or what?"

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Instead, he turned to the counter behind him and picked up a gun lying there—_my_ submachine gun. I was wary as he came out from behind the table. He watched me and waited for me to move. Like everything was back to normal. Who could say what he was thinking?

I needed to start moving, regardless of what he was planning. I couldn't threaten both of them at the same time. _What happens will happen._ I held onto one of Dawkins's arms and made my way into the hallway. I could hear more huge feet coming down the adjacent corridor. How many did he say there were? Too many. I paused, pressed up against the wall, as I came into range of the two nightkin in the hall. One of the blue monsters bulked on my left, and there was another to the right. Each held a rifle aimed squarely at our heads. I ducked down farther behind Dawkins. "Tell them to let us through," I said to Dawkins.

"You can't think you'll get out of here alive," the ghoul said in a low voice.

"Shut up." The nightkin ahead of us snarled and shifted anxiously. "Back up," I shouted to them. "You back up and keep going until I can't see you anymore. He'll be safe if you let me out of here."

At this there was much commotion. Dawkins gave them no direction in one way the other, but stood and seethed in front of me. "Tell them to put their guns down," I whispered to him. "They'll end up shooting us both."

He hesitated, but I knew he could see I was right. Mutants, regardless of how intelligent they were, were never very good shots. He made a motion for them to go, and the small blue herd reluctantly retreated.

I hurried down the halls, occasionally using Dawkins as a support when my legs shook. The nightkin stayed out of our way. Bruce trailed along silently behind me. I waited at the front door to make sure there was no ambush waiting for us. I checked behind me. "Watch my back," I said to Bruce, not knowing if he would, but without any other choice.

I edged around the side of the building, away from the entrance, then turned around and backed toward the chain link fence on the edge of the compound, putting the ghoul between myself and the building. There was a nightkin on the roof, one at the gate, and several at the entrance to the building.

Bruce was walking backwards as well, scanning the dark landscape.

"You're a real bastard, you know that?" Dawkins said to him. I jabbed him with the gun and he shut up. I walked along the fence, kicking at the base of the chain link until we came to a loose section. "Bruce," I nodded to the bottom of the fence. He ducked under it. Where was he going to get Breathe-Easy now, I wondered. I shoved Dawkins away and scrambled under the fence, expecting him to immediately run off back to the safety of the building and fetch the nightkin. But when I got to the other side, he was still standing there with his arms crossed.

"If I see you again, you're dead," he stated.

"Likewise," I spat, and started jogging away from the compound. After a moment, the ghoul turned and shouted to his nightkin, pointing at us. I ran.

"This way," Bruce said, and took off.

I looked over my shoulder once and saw the mutants gathering at the gate, but we quickly lost them among the buildings. After a while we slowed to a walk, both of us panting. Bruce pointed to redirect me every so often. We walked in silence the rest of the way to the Underground entrance. At the top of the stairs Bruce waited, staring into the windows of the buildings next-door. I didn't look and see if anyone was watching. I was either still too sedated from the drugs, or too tired of hiding to care.

I trudged down the stairs and went in—the door was still unlocked from when we'd left. I stopped under a skylight in the hall inside, and heard Bruce shut the door behind us. I closed my eyes and breathed. My head was still light. It felt as though I was dragging the rest of my body along. I leaned against the wall.

There was a rustling next to me. I opened my eyes again. Bruce was standing with his back against the door, just outside the frame of dim light cast cast through the skylight. I gave a half-hysterical laugh, and he looked up in surprise.

"What...what was that?" I said. I was so incredulous that I couldn't really render the feeling with my voice. What was I supposed to say to him after all that? "How long have you been planning this?"

He aimed his eyes at the wall, at the floor. At everything but me. "A few months," he said. Then he added, "It was a while ago. We haven't spoken about it since before you lost your memory. I tried to tell him to forget it today."

I snorted. "Is that why you were holding a gun to my head?"

"I wouldn't have done it," he said quickly. He looked very unhappy. "I don't think...even if it was a few months ago I don't think I would have been able to. I was just afraid that..." He made a helpless gesture. The movement made his sleeves slip above his wrists. I looked at the pale scars on his arms, and things that had gradually been coming together in my mind finally locked into place.

"I did that," I said. I pointed at his hands.

"What?"

"I made those scars, didn't I?"

My heart sank as he pulled his sleeves down. I wondered how many more there were that I couldn't see.

"Yes," he replied flatly.

"Why?"

And now, he looked at me sharply. "Because you're evil, I suppose. You do things like that. How should I know?"

I had nothing to say to that. I was evil, I guess.

I stared at the lines crossing his skin on his neck, all the way up onto his face. They would never go away. I didn't know why I would do that. But I had no reason not to, I guess. What did I care about him? About anyone?

But I did care about him. I was different now. He knew it too, or he wouldn't have helped me out of the compound. I don't know what had changed between my life before and this one, but something had. And I was another person.

I tried to put myself in the shoes of my former self. I thought about what made me do it, whether Bruce had tried to defend himself, whether I'd done it as a punishment or just in a fit of rage. I imagined myself making those cuts. I pictured myself slicing open his skin. Over and over again. I pictured him crying in pain and his blood staining my knife and my hands.

And at that moment I could have sworn I felt something physically snap in my head, and I could actually feel a wave of something go through me and a weight settle on my shoulders. Because that was when I remembered everything.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

I was six the first time I killed someone. When I found they had been carrying a bunch of Fancy Lads, I ate so many I puked pink. I had dreams that the whole world was sickly sweet and dyed fuchsia.

When I was fourteen I stepped on a landmine. I was in a clinic for months.

I had a best friend when I was younger. I met her when I was ten. She died ten years later after venturing into raider territory.

One time I fell off a bridge into the bay and nearly drowned. I never went in the water after that.

I got mugged all the time before I got big. The Regulators were usually no help. They were never around when you needed them. About half the time, the attackers were Leaguers. I hated them both.

I used to steal. A lot. I got pretty good at it before I was old enough to join a mercenary group. There was a man at Pike Place who caught me once, but he gave me the Nuka Cola I'd been trying to get anyway. He sometimes gave me food when I went by after that, but he disappeared after a while. I don't know what happened to him.

I don't really remember what my parents looked like. I don't know what happened to them, either.

I'd been so angry, all the time. The rage built after each injustice done to me, large or small. I'd had friends, a long time ago. But friends were temporary. They either became victims of the wasteland or predators who preyed on other victims. There was no one out there worth the time it took to get to know them. Everyone was out for themselves and no one could really be trusted. The world seemed set against me, and after everything it had done to me I didn't care whether everyone in it lived or died.

"Are you okay?"

I looked up, and Bruce was giving me a concerned look. I realized my face was wet. I wiped my eyes.

"I remember...I remember everything..."

My head pounded. I felt like I was going to vomit. I watched Bruce's expression change from disbelief to horror. His jaw dropped, but he didn't say anything. Idiot...

But no, he wasn't, was he? Why hadn't I ever noticed that? There were so many things that seemed so obvious now that had completely eluded me before. I'd started over after I'd been shot. I'd been a clean slate. And it had given me new eyes, as though I were a child again.

I looked away, putting my head in my hands. Bruce, to my relief, kept silent, presumably waiting to see what I'd do next. I didn't want to do anything. Not for the rest of my life. I wanted to disappear and escape the pounding in my head, the vortex of memories that I wished had just stayed lost in whatever abyss of my brain that they'd hidden in. I was ripped in pieces, torn between fury with Bruce and everyone else who'd fucked me over, frustration at how many stupid things I'd done in the past two months, and despair at how much I hated myself for everything I'd done prior to the past two months. I couldn't decide which pieces of myself I hated most.

When I'd been sitting quiet for too long, Bruce finally ventured to speak. "Ma'am?" he whispered.

And then there was a sharp bang on the door. I looked up. Bruce turned and backed away from it. What now?

There was another bang, and then the door flew open. A rush of people flooded into the room. It was almost comical, like clowns pouring out of a tiny car. There was a great fluttering of dusters, and then I was surrounded by Regulators training their weapons on my head. There must have been ten of them. I stared at them. After all the noise, it was quiet.

I didn't move—half out of surprise, and half because I just couldn't bring myself to care. I'd always thought there would be a fantastic, terrible struggle when this happened. I'd go out with a bang, taking as many people as possible with me. It would be remembered for years. Certainly I wouldn't just sit there and let them take me. Yet that is exactly what I did.

There came the sound of wooden-heeled boots crossing the brick floor. Out of the darkness appeared the chief behind the other Regulators. She looked at me. Something not-quite-pleased crossed her face. Disappointment, maybe. I looked at the wall.

"Chief?" someone in the crowd questioned.

She watched me a moment longer, then stepped back. "Arrest her."

-lll-

My new home was a small, dark cell in the Regulator's station. It contained a bed, sink, toilet, and bench on a dirt floor, and it was very quiet because I was the only prisoner there. I liked it okay, actually. Occasionally someone would come in, to bring food or try to talk to me. I hardly noticed except for the sound when the door to the hallway opened. Inevitably they'd leave after making noise for a while. The nearly dead light flickered whenever the door shut. It was the only source of light, as there were no windows, but I could tell roughly how much time had passed by when they stopped coming in to check up on me. At night they stayed away for a while. I tried to sleep most of the time, night or not. There was too much time to think, and I preferred not to. So I slept. And soon they'd kill me, and then I suppose I'd never have to think again.

I kept wondering why they didn't just do it. Maybe they were tormenting me on purpose. Though, knowing them, they were probably going to have some sort of trial before they did it. Maybe that's how they rationalized their self-appointed authority. There were many people who did terrible things under the flag of good. I had never done much to help anyone else, but at least I didn't bullshit myself about it.

I was sitting on the bench beside the bars one day when I became vaguely aware of someone speaking in the hallway. After a while, someone touched my arm. I pulled away and glared through the bars. Bruce was standing there. He looked at me closely, drawing his hand back to the other side of the door. "Are you alright?" he asked slowly, as if he were talking to a child.

I wasn't sure whether I was more grateful, irritated, or ashamed. I hadn't thought I would see him again. He wasn't in handcuffs. He still had his gun. And he'd been allowed in here without supervision. His presence dragged me painfully away from sleep and into the light of reality. I sighed and leaned back against the wall.

"I was talking to you. Couldn't you hear me?" Bruce said.

"No." My voice croaked from lack of use, and I coughed. "So, did you..." I waved vaguely to the cell. "...orchestrate this?"

"No."

That surprised me a little. I didn't say anything.

"I didn't. I had nothing to do with it," he repeated, with the same sort of voice he used when he thought I was going to hit him. Insistent, hopeful. It was different this time, though. He wasn't trying to convince me of his truthfulness because he was afraid.

"I believe you," I assured him, without much emotion.

"Have you really regained your memory?" he asked after a moment. I gave him a sharp look. He nodded. I didn't need to say anything else on the subject. I could feel him trying to figure me out. Every movement he made was tentative, every word calculated.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

He knelt next to the bars so he was closer to eye-level with me. "I've been talking with the Regulators." He pulled the collar of his shirt down, and I looked over to see a neat red line and a row of stitches just below his collarbone.

"They took it out?" I said. "What for?"

"They informed me that when one is deactivated, the other becomes unstable and can malfunction when it comes within range of other radio transmitters. I could have died if they hadn't taken it out."

They would know, I guess. They'd probably liberated more than a few slaves before, even if they couldn't officially interfere with the trade. I smirked. "I told you they wouldn't kill you."

He smiled. I don't think I'd ever seen him smile before. I covered my face with my hands.

Bruce reached through the bars again and put a hand on my arm. I slowly lowered it. He looked as though he was going to say something, then changed his mind. "I told the chief everything that's happened since you were shot," he said instead. "She wants to talk to you."

"Then why doesn't she come in here and do it?"

He hesitated. "We thought... _I _thought...that you might be more...receptive, if you heard it from me, first."

Sounded like they'd had a nice game of "who wants to talk to the violent, unstable mercenary first?". He didn't sound very sure of himself. But he had guessed right. I would much rather speak to him than anyone else.

"What does she want?"

"She wants to make a deal with you."

I narrowed my eyes. "What does that mean? What kind of deal?"

"She wants to hire you."

I waited, then realized he wasn't joking. I snorted. "What?"

"Let her explain," he said seriously. "I think you should listen to her."

I shrugged. Let her talk. It wasn't as if she could make anything worse than it already was.

Bruce let go of me and stood up. "I'm going to get her," he said, and hurried away as if he was afraid he'd lose me if he took too long. I did not look forward to seeing the chief again.

A few short minutes later, the door to the hall opened again and she appeared with Bruce close behind her. I followed her with my eyes as she walked leisurely toward my cell. She came to a stop in front of my door.

"Nice to see you again," she said, with only a hint of irony. I stared at her expressionlessly. She looked me over a moment longer, then produced a ring of keys. There was a jingling as she unlocked the door, but it slid open with surprisingly little sound. She stepped inside and leaned against the wall, leaving the cell door open behind her.

"When did you figure out it was us?" I asked.

She snorted. "Are you joking? It was obvious nearly from the start. You're the most suspicious person I've ever met. We should have arrested you at Gates' house, but we were short on evidence. Everyone's stories were confused and none of the mercs seemed to know who any of the others were. It wasn't until recently that Gates' assistant came forward with a good description of you."

I rolled my eyes.

"This is the third time I've been in here. Are you finally ready to talk?"

"Just say whatever you're going to say," I replied flatly.

She shrugged. "You were probably expecting to be dead by now. There's a reason you're not."

"You mean you haven't spared me out of the goodness of your heart?"

"You'd be surprised how many people are disinclined to kill indiscriminately," she said. "But no, that wasn't the only reason."

"So?" I prompted.

"We want your help."

"With what?"

She looked at me, unblinking, deadly serious. "We want Anton."

At the sound of the name, something burned inside me. I felt a little more alive. Of course they wanted Anton. What else could I have expected? "Alright," I said, lounging on my bench. "I'll do it."

The chief blinked, and I smiled inwardly at her obvious surprise. "I haven't told you what I want you to do yet," she said.

"Go ahead, then."

She glanced back at Bruce questioningly, the way a teacher chastising a student might look to their parent for guidance, but he had nothing for her.

"I wasn't expecting you to be so cooperative," she said to me.

I never expected to be working with Regulators on anything, either. But if I was being offered a possible way out of this, I was going to take it. Especially if it had the added bonus of getting rid of the psychopath who thought blowing up the city was the way to win its heart. "That guy's a rat bastard. If you think I have to like someone to take money from them, you're wrong. And it's not like I have much else to do," I added, gesturing sarcastically around the cell.

She smirked. "So he's as unpleasant in person as I picture him? He's never deigned to speak with me. Not for lack of trying on my part."

I nodded, and almost smiled back. For some reason I found it hard to sustain dislike for her. We could have been friends maybe, under other circumstances. I was under no illusions: we were on still on opposite sides. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In the wasteland, you learned to take what you could get.

You also learned not to piss off the person holding a gun to your head.

The chief sat down on the bed across from me and described her plan.

-lll-

Bruce didn't need to lead the way to the space needle. I knew where to go. I could feel the Regulators' eyes on us as we walked. I spotted one once in a while, in the window of a building or in an alley. They weren't going to let us out of their sight for a moment. They had planned an attack on the space needle. The only problem with a direct attack was that Anton would have an escape plan for if that happened. So the fact that Anton trusted me, at least enough to let me come up to meet him, and that he was too proud to keep any guards posted inside, were integral to our success. To the Regulators' success. My task was to keep him where he was while the Regulators took care of the Leaguers on the ground—whether he lived or died didn't seem to concern them. It was a bold strategy and I wasn't sure it was going to work, but our part sounded simple enough. After that, hypothetically, the Regulators would take control of the League in the vacuum of power that was created in Anton's absence.

It was quiet until Bruce suddenly asked, "What's your name?"

I frowned. I opened my mouth to tell him, then thought better of it. "It doesn't matter. The person who was called that doesn't exist anymore."

Bruce looked down, and smiled faintly. "I suppose so."

He had a nice smile. It was my own fault I'd never seen it before. I stared at the road ahead. "What will you do after this?" I asked, pointedly ignoring the glaring fact that we might not even make it through this.

"The chief has offered me a place with the Regulators."

I slowed and looked down at him. "She has?" I felt a pang of disappointment, but quickly pushed it away. "You're not really going to do it, are you?"

"Well...I was thinking about it," he said, glancing up to check my reaction. "That's one of the reasons I'm coming along. It's some kind of loyalty test for me, I think."

I scratched at the slowly healing wound on my chest. "You'd probably look good in a duster," I said slowly. "Just don't let them give you one of those stupid hats."

"I like the one I have," he replied.

As for what would happen to me when this was over, I was still uncertain. The chief said I could avoid execution if I did this for them. I was skeptical, but I also doubted Regulators would lie, even for the greater good. Either way, I wouldn't be seeing much of Seattle after this. I'd be pushing my luck if I stayed.

"It will be...strange, not having you here," Bruce said, apparently thinking the same thing.

"Yeah," I agreed. We'd been together a long time.

"I've never been by myself. I've never not been a slave. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do."

I laughed humorlessly. "That's stupid."

"I know."

My smirk faded. I thought for a moment. "You do whatever you want. You do that half the time, anyway. I doubt it will be as difficult as you think."

He shrugged.

"If I can do it, you sure as hell can." As I spoke, we rounded a corner and the space needle came into view. We were silent the rest of the way.

I stopped as we approached the guards posted in front of the entrance. "I have something to deliver," I told them, and the one on the left nodded. I recognized him from our last visit. Easy.

"Took your time, didn't you?" He commented as I handed him my weapons. We went unhurriedly to the towering white structure and stepped into the elevator. Through the grimy window I could see someone in a cowboy hat and duster crossing the street near the gate. One of the guards nudged the other and nodded toward the figure. He had good reason to take notice. Leaguers and Regulators usually steered clear of each other. This was going to be messy.

The elevator dinged cheerfully when it stopped at the top. We stepped out into the dim. The orange light of the setting sun streamed weakly through the windows, lighting up dust particles in the air. The guard in the elevator took us up to the office but did not follow us in. As he closed the door behind us, I slowly crossed the floor toward the polished wooden desk where our new sat. Our last target. He sat with his back straight, scrawling something in a ledger. I cleared my throat.

He looked up. A small but satisfied smile spread across his face. "You've returned." He set down his pen and stood. "You have the transmitter?"

"I got it, yeah." All I had to do now was wait for the Regulators to get moving.

"I'm pleased that your performance has improved."

"Great."

"It is, for both of us," he assured me. He chose to ignore Bruce, who stood quietly beside me. "The League is about to move up in the world, and so are you."

"Oh yeah?"

"I'd like you to join the League and work for me full time. There will be a lot of work to do after the Regulators are gone. We'll have to deal with stragglers, reinforcements from other states, maybe even uprisings within the League..."

"I don't want to join the League," I said.

He waved a hand. "The League is irrelevant. The only person you need to report to is me. Did I mention how much you'll be paid?"

"No thanks."

He gave me a confused look. I smiled. It wasn't very often that people said no to him, I'd guess.

"Any particular reason why?" he asked.

"I fear commitment."

He glared at me for a moment, obviously unamused. Then he opened his desk drawer. "Very well," he said, and drew a handgun from the drawer. My smile disappeared like ice under a blowtorch. "Are you familiar with the phrase, 'he who is not with me is against me'?"

I held up my hands. "Hey, wait. I'm not against anyone." I had not expected things to get violent before the attack below even started. I took a subtle step to the side, in front of Bruce. I was still wearing my vest.

"I don't know what kind of mercenary you are, but someone who won't be bought is no use to me. And I can't have loose ends running around while I'm trying to stage a revolution." He pulled the gun's hammer back.

There was a gunshot outside. Then several more in quick succession, some closer than the first. Anton took a cautious step back to look out the window.

I leapt forward, grabbed the ledger from his desk, and threw it at his face. He shot when I moved, and missed. I jumped over the desk, reaching for the gun. My foot caught on something and I went crashing into him. He made a breathless sound as he slammed against the floor with me on top of him. The gun went sliding away.

The gunshots outside sounded off like a fireworks display as we traded punches. I heard several explosions. Grenades. Eventually I got enough leverage to hold down Anton.

"Tell me again about this revolution you were going to have?" I said. He spat at me. I leaned away to peer under the desk to the other side. "Bruce?" I called. There was a dripping sound. I heard him step around the desk. I looked up, and was horror-stricken. "Oh, shit..."

He held the side of his face tightly. Blood dripped down his arm and spotted his left side. I had forgotten to get stims before I left. I hadn't planned on getting shot at up here. Taking advantage of the distraction, Anton thrashed beneath me. I pulled him up by the shoulders and slammed him back down, hard. He grunted as his head hit the floor. The building shook with the force of an explosion outside.

"How bad is it?" I asked Bruce. "Are you okay?"

He shrugged slowly, looking bewildered. He moved his hand, very carefully. There was a gash in his cheek, and a lot of blood. I swear I could feel it just looking at it.

Anton thrashed again, and with a snarl I slammed him against the floor two, three, four more times. He snarled back, but was beginning to look a bit faint.

I looked up at Bruce again, breathing hard. He was looking vacantly out the window at the battle below. He had not gone to get the gun.

"The bullet went through?" I asked him, trying to pull him out of whatever world he was in.

He turned to me and slowly nodded. "I think it—" he gasped softly. His teeth were coated red. "...Graze," he finished, trying to move his mouth as little as possible.

It didn't look like a graze to me. "It'll be alright," I said instead.

There was a deafening explosion, and the building shook so hard that we all went careening to the side, hitting the wall one after another. Our fight forgotten, we all looked out the window. The figures on the battlefield below had stopped shooting to look up at us. One of the legs of the building had been blown nearly in half at the base. There was the unmistakeable groan of slowly bending metal. The three of us exchanged looks of silent dread.

Anton was the first to move. He darted toward the elevators. I lurched after him and dove to grab his leg before he could get any farther. He fell forward.

"Are you crazy?" he shouted, turning back to look at me. He kicked out at my head. I ducked and grabbed his other leg. "Let go of me! They've destroyed the base of the building; we're all going to die if we don't get out of here!"

"Go," I said to Bruce, ignoring Anton. Behind him, the landscape in the window was tilting ever-so-slightly. The elevators would get stuck if the building kept moving. I swallowed. "I saw the door to the stairs near the elevator. Go."

"What?" he said back, and winced in pain. He looked angry. He finally seemed to be coming back to Earth. "You can't just stay up here. Forget him, let's just go!"

"You know I can't run that fast. I won't make it down."

"You could try!" he sputtered. The floor vibrated, and he stumbled.

"Quit wasting time and get out of here," I said through clenched teeth.

He gazed at me furiously. He opened his mouth to speak, then flinched and covered his face again. He glared a moment longer, then shook his head. He turned and ran toward the elevator. I watched him go.

The bottom of Anton's book hit me square in the face. Everything was black for a millisecond, and I felt my nose bleeding.

"Pardon me," he grunted, and kicked again. "But I'd rather not be a part of your suicide, if it's all the same to you." He drew back his foot to kick again, but I caught it and pushed down to keep him still. Fighting exhaustion, I crawled forward. As he reached toward me, I caught his wrist and took hold of his throat with my other hand, keeping just out of reach of his other hand.

"It's too late," I said. "We're going down together."

"You're insane."

"The world would be a better place without people like us," I replied, then drew back my fist, and hit him as hard as I could. He didn't move anymore.

I took a breath, then slowly got to my feet. The floor had taken on a definite slant. The thin legs that held up the top of the building were bending slowly, cracking as massive bolts popped under the strain. I stumbled and nearly fell as the floor vibrated and pitched violently. Step by shaky step, I made my way to a door frame at the end of the room and braced myself against it.

The view out the window angled downward more and more. It was falling faster now. The furniture in the room began sliding toward the windows. I watched the world turn sideways, coming closer and closer. Soon the city disappeared and I could only see the ground. The Leaguers and Regulators had all scattered, leaving behind the dead and the scorch marks they'd made on the dirt and pavement. I held tightly to the wall. The earth flew toward me. The sounds of twisting metal and crashing glass and wood became white noise. I closed my eyes.

-lll-

It was dark. I contemplated whether I was dreaming. But no, I was definitely awake. I could not move. How oddly familiar.

I was lying on something—I was too numb to tell what. My eyelids felt glued shut. Very slowly, I pried them open. I could see only a dark blur. I swallowed dryly and tried to focus. The room gradually distilled into solid shapes. I was lying on a hard bed in a small, dim room with peeling wallpaper and no door. There was an IV stand next to me which was draining into my arm.

Suddenly my heart beat faster. I pushed myself up to look down at my legs. Someone had removed my prosthetic. My other leg was still there. I tried moving it, and it shifted to the right. I examined it carefully for a moment, longer, then eased back down onto the bed. There had only been one other time when I'd woken up attached to an IV. As if to remind me, my phantom leg began clenching painfully. At least the rest of me felt awful, too. The phantom pain didn't seem so bad by comparison. I sighed, and looked at the ceiling. Several insects circled the yellowed light fixture silently. I didn't know what kind of drugs they'd given me, but the movement of the bugs was strangely mesmerizing. I found myself fading in and out.

After a while, a shadow fell over me. An overweight old woman had come in and was checking the IV she was wearing a green armband. I narrowed my eyes. She began fiddling with the tube in my arm. When she finished, she glanced up at my face and started when she saw me watching her.

"Oh! You're awake!"

I didn't bother to respond. I felt like a sack of lead. The numbness was wearing off, and every part of me burned and throbbed painfully.

"You should have told someone you were up," the woman chastised.

As far as I'd seen, no one had passed by since I'd awoken. I shrugged minimally. "Where is this?" My voice came out soft and raspy.

"The downtown clinic," she replied, crossing her arms. "Boy, are you a lucky one. I don't think any one person's ever had so many stimpaks. We hardly had any left for anyone else," she added with a note of disapproval. "By the way, are you feeling any side effects from the stims? Nausea, numbness or tingling, headache?"

She didn't seem to know who I was. I let myself relax a little bit. "Yes," I said groggily.

"Which ones?"

"All of them. Do you have anything for pain?"

"You haven't had enough drugs?" she muttered, but went to a cabinet on the wall and retrieved a small bottle and needle.

"What happened? Is...anyone else here?"

"Sure, lots of people. But you mean the short guy with the glasses, right? He didn't take a quarter as much work as you did. He's been in and out. He'll be back soon, I'm sure." She poked me in the arm with the syringe. "It's a shame about the needle."

"Huh?"

"That wreck they pulled you out of?" she clarified, raising her eyebrows. "It was the icon of the city. Lasted through the Great War, but not through you."

"Looked like a spaceship on stilts."

She looked like she didn't like my tone. "Well some of us liked it. What in the world was going on up there, anyway? It's been days and no one can get a straight answer. Were there really super mutants? I haven't seen one of those in years."

"I don't remember," I lied.

She looked like she didn't believe me, but didn't question me further. "You've got a lot of lucky stars to thank," she told me, moving to the doorway. "And thank your friend, too. He won't stop bothering us. He's annoying, but he's doing it because he's worried about you."

I couldn't tell if it was night or not, but soon after the nurse left I fell asleep anyway. She stopped in periodically to check on me. The fourth time she came in, she paused at the door. Too tired to open my eyes, I asked for more morphine. When she didn't answer, I looked up. It was Bruce, not the nurse, standing just outside the room. He carried a large backpack. I could see the end of my sniper rifle sticking out of it. "Um...I brought your stuff," he said. There was a piece of gauze taped over his cheek. He spoke quietly and was careful not to move his mouth too much. He glanced at my legs. "Your prosthetic was smashed, but I found someone who can fix it. It'll take a few more days to finish."

"Thanks..." Even at my best I wouldn't have been able to voice everything I needed to say to him. But now, half dead and so full of drugs and medicine that I was half asleep as well, I could hardly keep my thoughts together. "I'm...still alive," I said thickly. "You, too."

Bruce smiled. "Yes." He set the backpack down on the floor, and sat in the chair next to my bed.

"Wait...you took my prosthetic to get it fixed? How'd you pay for that? We didn't have much cash, last I knew."

"I had some saved up."

"Saved up? From where? I never gave you any money."

"You never counted it, so you never noticed when any was missing," he said matter-of-factly.

I blinked slowly. "You...you were stealing caps from me?"

He frowned. "Well, I helped you make the money in the first place. I should get some anyway," he said defensively.

I snorted, then winced and held my stomach protectively. "I don't think that's how slavery works."

"I don't think you're supposed to have people who hate you do your accounting, either."

"Stop making me laugh."

"I wasn't trying to."

I nodded at the gauze on his face. "What happened? Is it okay?"

He carefully peeled away the bandage and turned to show me. A harsh red line ran from near his ear almost down to the corner of his mouth. Quite a few stitches lined the wound.

"Why didn't they just stim it?" I asked.

"It will heal more cleanly this way," he replied, moving the gauze back into place. "I'm not supposed to talk too much."

"That shouldn't be difficult for you."

"No."

There didn't seem to be anything wrong with him. I would be lying if I said I wasn't hugely relieved. "So you got out in time."

"No. I almost did. You were right, you wouldn't have made it. The staircase bent until it cracked and fell out from under me. I broke several bones."

"You look fine to me."

"Miracles of modern medicine," he replied wryly. "After the needle fell, the chief was running around looking for us. Everyone had quit fighting. She found me and got me some stims. It took them a while to find you."

"You mean they bothered to look for me?" I muttered.

"Well...they were looking for Anton, but you were sort of in the same vicinity."

"Uh-huh."

"He didn't make it. I...I couldn't believe that you did. Even after we found you, I didn't think you would last much longer."

"Yeah...me too," I murmured. We looked at each other. He shifted his gaze to the floor.

"Hey," I said quietly, "what's up with this place? My nurse is a Leaguer. So were some of the others I saw walking by."

He looked up. "Yeah. They run the clinic."

"Aren't they upset that we...you know...just killed their boss?"

"I wondered about that, too," he said thoughtfully. "But I don't know that it's had a huge effect on them. The League is going to keep going mostly the same as it always has, regardless of who's in charge. I don't think most of them either know or care about who runs their organization so long as it keeps running. There has been minimal violent backlash. Most of it was from the guards at the space needle. Maybe Anton should not have been as reclusive as he was." He shrugged. "Most people like the Regulators, anyway—even most of the Leaguers I've met. I think the main reason a rivalry existed was because Anton perpetuated it. Without him, resistance will die off quickly."

I had expected worse. But, I suppose, people usually took the path of least resistance.

"The chief said that you should leave as soon as you recover," Bruce said hesitantly. "She said it would cause problems if you stayed around. Only a few of the other Regulators know exactly who you are, but it won't stay that way for long."

He sounded like he thought I wouldn't like to hear that. I didn't, but I'd been planning to leave anyway. I just rolled my eyes. My leg clenched again. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying not to feel anything.

"What's wrong?" Bruce asked.

"My leg hurts," I grumbled, giving in and feeling sorry for myself. "They cut it off almost twenty years ago. It's not enough that I don't fucking have it anymore, it has to hurt all the time to remind me, too. Fuck." I exhaled slowly, trying to calm myself. "The morphine is helping everything else, but it doesn't seem to effect phantom pain."

Bruce was quiet for a moment. Then he got up. "I'll be right back," he said, and left the room.

A few minutes later he came back, carrying a tall, thin mirror. "Can you sit up?" he asked.

"I haven't tried." With much effort, I leaned forward to prop myself up on my elbows. My neck cracked. Everything was stiff and heavy. After a pause, I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position. My chest ached. "What's that for?" I asked, looking at the mirror.

He set it down beside the bed. "Swing your legs over the side."

I was beginning to grow impatient, but complied. He pushed the mirror forward so that it reflected the inner side of my right leg. I gave him a questioning glance.

"If you look at it from the right angle, it looks like you've still got both of them," he said.

"Yeah, I guess," I said, leaning to look into the mirror. "So?"

He didn't say anything right away. I watched the mirror, moving my foot gently back and forth. I smiled faintly. After a few moments, something strange happened. My jaw dropped. "What the _hell_?"

"...Does that mean it's working?" Bruce asked.

As I moved my foot, I could feel the phantom move along with it. The pain began to ebb as I moved, as though the cramping muscles had finally released, after twenty years. "How does it do that?"

"It's a common treatment for phantom pain. If the brain can be fooled into thinking a missing limb is still in pain, it can be fooled into thinking the pain has been alleviated. It may eventually stop altogether if you keep doing it."

"But how..." I stared at the mirror, in awe. "Those nurses really know their stuff, don't they?"

"I read about it in a book, actually."

"Really? What book?"

He suddenly looked guilty. "Just...one that I had around..."

One of the ones he'd had at 1106, he meant. I stopped swinging my foot. "You read it a long time ago, didn't you?"

He glanced to the side. "A while ago, yes."

I glared at him, and he shrugged in a manner that said he didn't regret not telling me. I was reminded of why I'd disliked him so much. But my anger didn't last long. "Bruce..."

He watched, waiting for me to continue. I started falteringly, but then it all began pouring out of me all at once. "I'm so sorry. For everything I did to you. You never deserved any of it. I am never going to do that to anyone else again. A lot of things happened to me when I was younger, I just...I didn't start out that way. Somehow I just didn't take notice or care when I got older and I started doing things like..." I glanced at the scars on his wrists, and quickly looked away again. "Like that. I don't know why it took getting shot in the head for me to realize that there was something wrong with me. I know it doesn't make a difference now, but I'm sorry."

He took a heavy breath, breathing out slowly. "It makes a difference," he assured me quietly.

My leg began to hurt again, and I bent to look in the mirror. "Are you really going to become a Regulator?"

"Don't you think I should?"

I shook my head. "I'm not going to decide for you."

"...Yes, I am."

I didn't look up at him, but he could probably see the disappointment on my face anyway.

"I can't go with you," he said softly, with resolve but almost apologetically. He wasn't going to change his mind. "If I keep following you around I'll just be doing the same thing I've been doing for the rest of my life, and there's no point to it. I need to go do something on my own."

"I know."

We sat quietly for a minute. I set the mirror to the side. Bruce stood up.

"I just came to give you that," he said pointing to the pack. "And I told the nurses where you can pick up your prosthetic. I'm going back to see the chief now."

I nodded. We weren't going to be seeing each other for a long time, after this. Maybe never, even. The both of us were starting anew, now. "Maybe I'll have a new name to tell you, next time we meet," I said.

"I hope so," he said, pausing at the doorway. He flashed me a ghost of a smile. Then he turned, and left.

I watched the empty doorway a while longer. Then I took a breath and pushed off of the bed. I eased down until all my weight rested on my foot. It hurt, but not so much that I couldn't do it. Carefully, I let go of the bed so that I stood on my own. It wasn't easy, but I could balance there.

It was going to be a long journey to wherever I was going, but I was strong enough to carve a new path, and I was strong enough to do it on my own.

**—The End—**

* * *

_To everyone who read: Thanks for sticking with it these seventy-some thousand words, and I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to review or PM your comments. They really do help!_

_Also: I think it's cool how Fallout games always take place in real world settings and have fairly accurate maps. For the curious, here are real places visited in this story: Enumclaw, Beacon Hill, Sodo, I-5, the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Medina, Lake Union, Pike Place, Denny Triangle, Seattle Center, Pioneer Square/the Underground, and Puget Sound. _


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